A Reader's Guide to the Narrative and Lyric Poetry of Thomas Lovell Beddoes [1 ed.] 9781443884051, 9781443882569

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A Reader’s Guide to the Narrative and Lyric Poetry of Thomas Lovell Beddoes

A Reader’s Guide to the Narrative and Lyric Poetry of Thomas Lovell Beddoes By

Rodney Stenning Edgecombe

A Reader’s Guide to the Narrative and Lyric Poetry of Thomas Lovell Beddoes By Rodney Stenning Edgecombe This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Rodney Stenning Edgecombe All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-8256-9 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8256-9

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgements ................................................................ vii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One ............................................................................................... 10 The Juvenilia Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 45 “The Improvisatore” Chapter Three .......................................................................................... 106 Miscellaneous Poems Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 144 Outidana Part 1 Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 178 Outidana Part 2 Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 225 Outidana Part 3 Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 255 “Letters in Verse” Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 287 Poems Chiefly from Death's Jest-Book (Composed 1825-1829) Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 322 Poems from the Later Versions of Death’s Jest-Book and Other Poems, 1829-44 Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 351 The Ivory Gate

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Table of Contents

Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 393 Last Poems (Composed 1844-8) Notes........................................................................................................ 419 Bibliography ............................................................................................ 464 Index ........................................................................................................ 490

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEGEMENTS

The following material has been incorporated into the text by permission of the journals in question, and I am very grateful to them: "An Allusion to Endymion in Beddoes's 'Phantom-Wooer.'" Notes and Queries 55.4 (2008): 440-41. "Operatic Sources for Death's Jest-book." Notes and Queries 55.4 (2008): 441-43. "Thomas Lovell Beddoes's "Alfarabi": A Redating and Reconsideration." Keats-Shelley Review 25.2 (2011): 101-21. "Canning's 'Sainte Guillotine" and Beddoes's 'Comet.'" The Keats-Shelley Review 27.1 (2013): 26-30. I should also like to thank Amanda Millar of Cambridge Scholars Publishing for all her help with the MS, and Anita Visser and Alexander d'Angelo of the Chancellor Oppenheimer Library, University of Cape Town, for their kind assistance in securing the monographs and articles that I needed in writing this book.

INTRODUCTION

Beddoes poses a peculiar problem for critics and scholars wishing to redress the marginal position that this gifted writer occupies in the Romantic canon—a problem seemingly unique to him, and created in part by his misconception of his own strengths as a writer. Others have erred in this way, but not with such catastrophic results. Patrick White, for example, while he misdirected energy into the production of second-rate plays, kept more than enough in reserve to realize his position as an important novelist of the twentieth century. Beddoes was less fortunate. An extremely good poet who, had things turned out differently, might have functioned as a missing link between Keats and Tennyson, he fatally divided his attention between verse and medicine, a discipline that by his own admission (made in the poem composed for Zoë King) served to wither his creative gift. In this he resembles Alexander Borodin, who could have achieved greater heights as a composer had not he been distracted by his duties as a professor of chemistry. The fission of energy was bad enough, but more damaging still was the misconception of metier, for whatever mental resources remained to Beddoes after gruelling days in the classroom he invested in writing an unstageable drama instead of in his primary gift for lyric verse. Properly developed, it could have ranked him proxime accessit in relation to the great Romantics of the second generation, but that was not to be. Arthur Symons's diagnosis of Death's Jest-Book explains why: But there never was anything less dramatic in substance than this mass of admirable poetry in dialogue. Beddoes' genius was essentially lyrical: he had imagination, the gift of style, the mastery of rhythm, a strange choiceness and curiosity of phrase. But of really dramatic analysis he had nothing. He could neither conceive a coherent plot, nor develop a credible situation. He had no grasp on human nature, he had no conception of what character might be in men and women, he had no faculty of expressing emotion convincingly.1

The Beddoes revival that has been gathering momentum in recent years has centred on Death's Jest-Book, a work analysed and appraised in such groundbreaking studies as those by Alan Halsey,2 Michael Bradshaw,3and Ute Berns.4 The first two of these scholars have also produced editions of

2

Introduction

the text in question, even though this will remain as unstable and insusceptible of resolution as Offenbach's Contes d'Hoffmann, another work-in-progress that reached the public after the death of its author, and which has been re-edited ever since. Given the fact that Death's Jest-Book has been so well researched, and also because its deficiencies far outweigh the beauties of its blank verse, I have chosen to focus wholly on Beddoes's lyric and narrative verse, much of which has received short critical shrift. Daniel Karlin, for example, claims that the poet "was a second-rate writer. He thought so himself. He was that rare thing, an honest, unaffected selfdispraiser,"5 and bases this assessment on a perceived limitation of scope: "It is one thing to see the skull beneath the skin. But what if you see nothing else?" (p. 36). The answer to that question lies in the richness and comprehensiveness of the sic transit outlook that Eliot's tribute to Webster actually entails. An awareness of the skull doesn't desensitize one to the varying texture of the skin that clothes it. Indeed one's appreciation of that texture is enhanced and rendered more poignant by the fact of its transience. Sic transit is the still centre of Beddoes's turning mental world, and gives an unexpected thematic coherence to his restricted lyric output. Even the most fragmentary of his fragments have an arresting vividness, a vividness that points to the probable resolutions that the poet had in store for them. The same can't be said for Death's Jest-Book, where instead of providing a focal point, the poet's idée fixe becomes a shackle, and all the characters its commutable and ventriloquial vectors. His lyric strength commutes into dramatic weakness to the extent that the play shows no objective differentiation, existing inertly as the expatiations of a single consciousness. Not so the song lyrics embedded in it after the example of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, and which can be detached like jewels from their overwrought setting—and not so those song lyrics composed without any thought of the stage at all. The last are vital and energetic, prompting Christopher Ricks to claim in his seminal essay that it is the "life, sometimes restless, sometimes restful, within Beddoes's very words, which most needs to be made manifest."6 Ricks's penetrating and attentive analyses draw attention to the subtlety and interest of those words, and I have tried to follow in his example by repeatedly putting them under the magnifying glass. I shall be hugging the coast of the H. W. Donner edition7 from "The Improvisatore" to the "Last Poems," and since the texts themselves will be my priority, any generalities I formulate will emerge from the tissue of close analysis instead of being posited inductively. As a result, the reader will not confront a problem that often bedevils critical discourse on Beddoes, viz, his "readers' unfamiliarity with the texts" (Bradshaw, p.

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6). The dramatic poetry—by and large the focus of most Beddovian criticism up till now—will enter my purview only through the lyrics that were intended to grace it, though it goes without saying that his blank verse, qua poetry (as opposed its dramatic appropriateness), is always assured and not infrequently excellent. John Forster made no attempt at digesting Death's Jest-Book when he introduced it to the Victorian public, and offered instead a florilegium of "purple passages" divorced from its incoherent plot and incredible situations. In a word, he suppressed the dramatic matrix and foregrounded the verse texture: . . . But surely all we have quoted, fragmentary as it is, proclaims a writer of the highest order—magnificent in diction, terse and close in expression, various and beautiful in modulation, displaying imaginative thoughts of the highest reach, and sweeping the chords of passion with a strong and fearless hand. Plenty of defects may be noted—scenes hastily constructed, characters exalted into mere passionate abstraction, motives too sudden, loves and revenges too abundant and intense—but never a want of sincerity, never a borrowed trick, never a gaudy irrelevance, never a superfluous commonplace.8

Characterizing Beddoes as a poet both "magnificent in diction" and "terse and close in expression," Forster also touched on a crux that still awaits resolution, viz., whether the verse of Death's Jest-Book should be judged by modern or archaic standards. Should we regard it as a vital, unmediated nineteenth-century idiom or as neo-Romantic pastiche? Geoffrey Wagner, recalling Lytton Strachey's bon mot, affirms that while Beddoes "was 'the last Elizabethan' he was also the first of the moderns,"9 and Eleanor Wilner builds on his aperçu: Thus the desire to rescue Beddoes from his undeserved obscurity and to explore his vision at length stems from this precocious modernity, his manifestly powerful poetic voice, and the way in which his despairing and demonic vision offers the negative image of a century whose contradictions he suffered and articulated at a time when they remained hidden to most men. Many of our own artists and thinkers share his sense that these contradictions are incurable, and that they are in the nature of things and men.10

The opposing school of thought is exemplified by Ezra Pound, who for his own part tessellated verse out of the fragmented past—pastiche in the Italian sense of "pasticcio," which is to say, "pezzo . . . scritto in collaborazione [in this case, cross-temporal] da diversi compositori", and something to be distinguished from "pastiche," a piece "il cui autore ha

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Introduction

imitato lo stile di altri." The first presents itself as a naked act of bricolage; the second disguises its borrowings as feat of empathetic reconstruction: Can a man write poetry in a purely archaic dialect? Presumably he can, and Beddoes has done so; but would not this poetry, his poetry be more effective, would not its effectiveness be much more lasting if he had used a real speech instead of a language which may have been used on the early Victorian stage, but certainly had no existence in the life of his era?11

Some might answer in the affirmative, as Royall Snow does when he points out that in the orderly sequence of the history of literature [Death's Jest-Book] has no place; it belongs to no school and no period. Written in the nineteenth century its language has, by right divine and not artifice, the fine unexpectedness of the days of Elizabeth.12

As a claim with respect to the language of Death's Jest-Book, Snow's position is certainly defensible, especially since the "real speech" that Pound fetishizes as a sine qua non arrived in non-burlesque verse only with the advent of modernism. Besides, any doubt about the aesthetic viability of pastiche will be dispelled the moment we recall such works as "The Eve of St Agnes" and "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." And even if the idiom of Death's Jest-Book might cause such questions to arise, they scarcely obtain in respect of Beddoes's free-standing poems, which, notwithstanding a "mediaevalist" experiment or two, emerge freshly and engagingly ex peto, and which are situated well within the lexical compass of Regency and early Victorian verse. Indeed, his non-dramatic writing relies so little on pastiche that it seems much more progressive than retrograde, and looks ahead now and then to the work of the French Symbolistes. It also not infrequently suggests an acquaintance with the cutting-edge efforts of Victor Hugo up to and including Les Rayons et les ombres (1840), poems linguistically adventurous in a way unmatched by their English coevals. In a letter to John Kelsall, Beddoes claimed that "Apollo has been barbarously separated by the moderns" and resolved "to unite him" (pp. 610-11). He clearly hoped at this stage of his career to effect a union between science and literature, subjects somewhat interinvolved in the Augustan era, but increasingly alienated in the eras that followed. By studying medicine, he hoped to establish an interface between mind and body in terms as frankly physiological as the Cartesian location of the soul in the pineal gland. Though undertaken with an eye to effecting a marriage of aesthetic and poetic experience with bodily functions, this amounted to

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bad science: the "middle ground on which this reconciliation [between the disjecta membra of an Apollo drawn and quartered] was to take place appears to have been nearer the intuitive side of his personality than the intellectual, in what we should call the occult."13 In the event, bad science also issued in bad poetry, the experience of the dissecting table having prompted the coarse, defiant Totentanz of Death's Jest-Book, and deflected the poet's lyric gift into a metier to which it was little suited. The result of these repeated and self-destructive efforts at laughing death out of countenance was to exhaust Beddoes's creativity, for the wellspring of his imagination (essentially romantic and descriptive rather than satirical and dramatic) was neutered by the Gradgrindian facts he had accumulated at Göttingen—or so one infers from the confessional poem mentioned above: Fain would have spellbound fiction's fairest shapes And sent them captive to pay homage there. But all in vain: the truth was restless in him, And shook his visionary fabrics down, As one who has been buried long ago And was now called up by a necromancer To answer dreadful questions; so compelled, He left the way of fiction and wrote thus: 'Woe unto him whose fate hath thwarted him, Whose life has been 'mongst such as were not born To cherish in his bosom reverence, And the calm awe that comforteth the heart And lulls the yearnings of hope unfulfilled:['] (pp. 102-03)

In this testament to an existence that, from a creative point of view, had been largely misspent, he regrets the loss of the "calm awe" incompatible with the bravado of Death's Jest-Book. Wordsworth, after all, had argued that calm—passion quiescent if not passion spent—was a necessary precondition for poetry: I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of re-action, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.14

Not only does this specify a composure foreign to the febrile spirit of Beddoes's play but it also stresses the need for persisted effort through time. A long and shapeless enterprise, endlessly reworked in breaks between medical lectures, will necessarily suffer from the circumstances

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Introduction

of its composition. Beddoes didn't have time enough to arrive at greatness, differing in this respect from Keats's single-minded pursuit of his vocation: He ended his letter to George with yet another rueful shrug at his laurelcrowning episode, and to this or another letter from Canterbury, he added the comment 'I have forgotten all surgery.' It was not that he regretted his medical training; but the step he felt he had taken in formulating and writing this credo now marked him off from his past for ever.15

Edmund Blunden also had Keats in mind when he praised the ease and trenchancy of Beddoes's informal prose— The author of Death's Jest Book was a poet capable of fair and sublime revelations, a judge of life who could write a letter almost as vivid and rapid as those of Keats, a man of unusual scientific training and insight; and yet here he was burying his wit and his glory deeper and deeper "in the grave."16

—and regretted the Sisyphean futility of trying to perfect a work with foundations infinitely more "sandy" than those of Endymion. Keats had had the wisdom to write the last off as a learning experience, as a way of graduating to greater things. Beddoes, by contrast, persevered at his hopeless task. However, in spite of that expense of spirit in a shameful waste, he still eked out a body of lyric verse that matched the excellence of his prose, though certainly not "rapid," given its statuesque, mannered elaboration, and, while "vivid," not vivid in the sense of being immediately apprehensible. Its expression is often circuitous, and prone to follow unbeaten tracks of lexis and syntax, a tendency of which he was well aware, and which he traced to the texts—many of them obscure by the standards of Regency Britain—he read in childhood and adolescence. To absorb Cowley with one's mother's milk is perhaps to predestine oneself to an involuted kind of poetry: For of the three classes of defects which you mention—obscurity, conceits, and mysticism,—I am afraid I am blind to the first and last, as I may be supposed to have associated a certain train of ideas to a certain mode of expressing them, and my four German years may have a little impaired my English style; and to the second I am, alas! a little partial, for Cowley was the first poetical writer whom I learned to understand. (p. 642)

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But while the Metaphysical idiom of Donne can often be mathematically abstract, Beddoes is never jejunely cerebral: he sensualizes the conceit, giving abstractions a concrete embodiment and then, in the last resort, failing to make that embodiment physically plausible. Solecisms and catachreses often arise in consequence, but the "obscurity, conceits, and mysticism" amount less to defects than to loci of imaginative strength. Graham Robb has written that Victor "Hugo's single greatest contribution to modern literature was a kind of transcendent modesty: the revelation that words were creatures with a life of their own, that to write a poem or a novel is not to go shopping for the best verbal approximation to reality, but to engage in a mysterious collaboration, to invent a new reality."17 The same might be said of the curious linguistic realm into which the verse of Beddoes takes us. The thematic range of that realm might at first blush seem limited, though Northrop Frye tries to justify the poet's death-obsession as the paradoxical obverse of his vitality: "The complete identity with nature, which is the fulfilment of life, is achieved visibly only by death; hence death is the most accurate symbol of the ultimate meaning of life".18 That might contain an element of sophistry, however, for Beddoes never strove for a "complete identity with nature", rather viewing it sub specie mortis instead of sub specie aeternitatis (as in the contrastively affirmative Weltanschauungs of Shelley and Wordsworth). It therefore seems more politic for the poet's apologists to acknowledge the "thanatism" instead of recasting or disguising it. One must simply point out that his obsession, while it might restrict his range, by no means damns or even impairs his verse. Geoffrey Wagner remarks that with Beddoes "death becomes baroque,"19 claiming for the idée fixe the same insistent, writhing energy that typified the art of the early seventeenth century, an art more motile rather than balanced. At the same time, Snow stresses the frontality with which Beddoes addresses death, showing that frontality doesn't of itself preclude nuance and gradation: "The power of the abnormal is there, but not an abnormal which is lurking and sly, but one which is robust and powerful, which occupies the foreground rather than lurks in the shadows of his mind. But there is also the sting of an astringent and critical mind behind it."20 The "sting of an astringent and critical mind" is what led to the foundering of Death's Jest-Book, which the poet could never bring to a desired state of functioning and polish, and one might be forgiven for extracting its lyric ore from otherwise barren rifts. Alan Halsey objects to this procedure, however, stressing the integrity of its lyrics to their matrix, and claiming that its "songs are 'lyric' in a sense in which the majority of

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Introduction

twentieth-century lyrics are not."21 He goes on to suggest that "if anthologists want justification for concentrating on this area of his work they can find it in his letters: 'song-writing is the only kind of poetry of wh I have attained a decided and clear critical theory'" (p. 250). So far so good, but he then moves to an unwarrantable conclusion: "The problem is that the play to which these lyrics belong is thus automatically set aside—a misconceived work eccentric as its author, incoherent, foredoomed to failure. The orthodoxy implies that despite his statement about songwriting, Beddoes was blind to his only true strength as a poet" (p. 250). Far from it. What the orthodoxy implies is that Beddoes had mastered the principles of lyric but had failed to grasp the most basic principles (objectivity, multi-facetedness) of dramatic composition, presumably because he failed consciously to formulate them into theory. Besides, songs written for the drama (and even for novels) can easily break free of their moorings and function in self-sufficient ways, as witness the dirge from Cymbeline and Olivia's lament in The Vicar of Wakefield. Beddoes was, in the last resort a highly professional poet, but a lamentably amateur dramatist. Goethe is worth quoting in this regard: When a dilettante has done what lies within his capacity to complete a work, he usually makes the excuse that of course it's as yet unfinished. Clearly, it can never be finished because it was never properly started. The master of his art, by means of a few strokes, produces a finished work; fully worked out or not, it is already completed. The cleverest kind of dilettante gropes about in uncertainties and, as the work proceeds, the dubiousness of the initial structure becomes more and more apparent. Right at the end the faulty nature of the work, impossible to correct, shows up clearly, and so, the work can never be finished.22

There lies the crux of the matter. Beddoes dilettantishly misapplied his significant talent to a work "impossible to correct." The anagnorisis regarding this misapplication arrived too late, a fact indicated by the heartbreaking epitaph—too humble by far—of his suicide note: "I ought to have been among other things, a good poet."23 A good poet he certainly was, as I hope to prove in this monograph. Properly focussed, he could have been a great one. The sentence that follows—"Life was too great a bore on one peg, and that a bad one" (p. 262)—refers to the prosthesis forced upon him by a lost limb, but it also in a sense allegorizes his aesthetic tragedy. If we construe "peg" as the "wooden or metal pins to tighten or loosen (and so tune) the strings of a musical instrument" (SOED), it encapsulates the narrow emotional range and tonal monotony of Death's Jest-Book upon which Beddoes wasted so much valuable time.

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But how remarkable that, that false turn notwithstanding, his lyric poetry should still prove so fresh and engaging. In a note to Ivanhoe, Scott remarked that Coleridge's "Muse so often tantalises with fragments which indicate her powers, while the manner in which she flings them from her betrays her caprice, yet whose unfinished sketches display more talent than the laboured masterpieces of others."24 That supplies a more fitting epigraph for Beddoes's career. Many of his lyric poems are fragmentary, and yet, for all their imperfections, much to be preferred to the "laboured masterpieces" of a Southey, say, or a Procter.

CHAPTER ONE THE JUVENILIA

Introducing his edition of Beddoes, H. W. Donner calls him "a poet of fragments."1 These fragments constellate in a no less fragmentary sequence, for even the earliest poems pose problems of dating. To quote Donner yet again, "we cannot say for certain that any other than the Hymn from Scaroni was actually written before he left the Charterhouse. Be it sufficient that they belong to the first years of his authorship" (p. xxv). He does, however, concede that the "two fragments of The New-born Star . . . may be of a later date." But even though the chronology of the poems be riddled with lacunae, the child in Beddoes, more than in most poets, is father to the man. Almost everything he wrote, from adolescence to maturity, centres on the topics of death and time, and the differences between the various pieces relate more to issues of texture than of content. That there is critical unanimity in this regard can be gathered from Michael Bradshaw on the one hand—"Beddoes's subject as a writer was always death, from the earliest Lewisite horrors of the juvenile prose tale Scaroni (1818) . . . to the lyrical dissolution of his last poems from the 1840s"2—and G. R. Potter on the other, who remarks that his "sense of the strange, mysterious recesses of time, both past and future, the sense that the present is bound to the past and future by indissoluble ties, is one of the characteristic notes in his verse that help give it the unique quality which it possesses."3

"Hymn from Scaroni, or The Mysterious Cave [1818] (p. 3) This invocation is extracted from the "Romantic Fiction" that Beddoes composed in 1818. It lacks individuality, but has some features to recommend it—the framing inclusio that imparts a certain ritual tidiness, and the hieratic anaphora. Beddoes seems to have found inspiration in the invocations of Macbeth—"All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Glamis" (1.3.48)—and (a keen opera aficionado) he might also have remembered the advent of the Queen of the Night in Die Zauberflöte:

The Juvenilia

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Erste Dame. Es verkündet the Ankunft unserer Königin. (Donner.) Die drei Damen. Sie kommt! (Donner.) Sie kommt! (Donner.) Sie kommt!—4 [First Lady. It proclaims the advent of our queen. (Thunder) The Three Ladies. She comes! (Thunder.) She comes! (Thunder.) She comes!—]

The idea of a godly catabasis can be found in Gray's "Descent of Odin. An Ode", a poem that might also have prompted Beddoes's tetrameter couplets (though Shakespeare also used this metre for the eldritch moments of Macbeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream): Uprose the King of Men with speed, And saddled straight his coal-black steed; Down the yawning steep he rode, That leads to Hela's drear abode.5

Advent hymns in the Charterhouse chapel no doubt supplied further grist to the poet's mill, as witness the gesture of revelation in Wesley's ("Lo, he comes with clouds descending, / Once for favoured sinners slain"6) and the confident prophecy of Milton's ("The Lord will come and not be slow, / His footsteps cannot err"—p. 57). Even in this undistinctive (and undistinguished) early poem, we catch a glimpse of Beddoes's future virtuosity when an anapaest—"In the light"—flickers out against the iambic pulse: "In the lightning's flash, and thunder's roar."

"St Dunstan" [1821] (p. 3) Dickens entertainingly captured the lore upon which Beddoes based this poem in A Child's History of England: Dunstan, Abbot of Glastonbury Abbey, was one of the most sagacious of these monks. He was an ingenious smith, and worked a forge in a little cell. This cell was made too short to admit of his lying at full length when he went to sleep—as if that did any good to anybody!—and he used to tell

12

Chapter One the most extraordinary lies about demons and spirits, who, he said, came there to persecute him. For instance, he related that one day when he was at work, the devil looked in at the little window, and tried to tempt him to lead a life of idle pleasure; whereupon, having his pincers in the fire, red hot, he seized the devil by the nose, and put him to such pain, that his bellowings were heard for miles and miles. Some people are inclined to think this nonsense a part of Dustan's madness (for his head never quite recovered the fever), but I think not. I observe that it induced the ignorant people to consider him a holy man, and that it made him very powerful. Which was exactly what he always wanted.7

The poet looks ahead to this roistering irreverence when he makes his subject the patron saint of noses rather than blacksmiths, doing homage to such misprisions as that, for example, which turned Agatha into the guardian of bell-ringers and bakers, the breasts of her martyrdom (a double mastectomy) having been misread as bells or loaves. Furthermore, remembering that Milton had turned the deities of Olympus into Semitic demons—"The rest were long to tell, though far renown'd, / Th' Ionian Gods, of Javan's Issue held / Gods, yet confest later than Heav'n and Earth / Thir boasted Parents"8—Beddoes reconceives the devil as the god of the underworld. He also turns the saint's sadistic triumphalism into a grotesque act of hygiene ("blew Pluto's nose with his tongs"). The squib all but foreshadows the clerihew, since, like that form, it presents a biographical vignette in off-centred terms, casual syntax here taking the place of the casual scansion of Bentley's invention. Nineteenth-century iconology, perhaps because of Delacroix's engravings for Faust, tended to favour the devil with an aquiline nose. We catch a glimpse of this convention when Dickens gives one of his villains "a hook nose, handsome after its kind, but too high between the eyes."9 Dunstan, on the other hand, uses his tongs to shorten that member—or so the hearty imperative implies (as though shouted by a spectator at a boxing match): "Gnaw short the long nose." "Gnaw," initially a command, almost immediately turns into an onomatopoeic snort, proving that mutilation hasn't prevented it from breathing: "Gnaw, quoth the short." By way of coda, we learn that "a nose is a nose is a nose," however much the iconography of Delacroix and Dickens might have tried to demonize one shape and valorize another.

"Within a Bower of Eglantine" (pp. 3-4) Had this fragment been more closely worked, it could have passed muster as a proto-Imagist vignette, but its imperfections are too many. In the opening line—"When the night-air filled the holes between / The stalks of

The Juvenilia

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light and tender green"—the word "holes" converts the random interstices of a creeper into symmetrical apertures like those on a Chinese Checkers board, and the air that fills them, since a filled hole is no longer a hole, develops an improbable opacity. Beddoes also drops a syntactic stitch when the "night-air" grasps the drop of dew instead of the "cup of its flower" (clearly the intended accusative). Nor can one applaud "cypress stalks," a noun too pliant for those sturdy columnar trunks, which can hardly be woven into bowers.

“Song from Eriphyle's Love A Dramatic Tale" (p. 4) The name "Eriphyle" means "tribal strife," and it's possible that Beddoes was thinking here of the character in the Thebaid—possible only, for there aren't enough data in the poem to be sure of his purpose. The original Eriphyle, vain and treacherous, was bribed by a necklace to "settle the dispute between Amphiarus and Adrastus."10 No hint of that in this aubade, however, though there is more than a touch of Cymbeline 2.3.1925: Hark, hark, the lark at leaven's gate sings, And Phoebus gins arise, His steeds to water at those springs On chalic'd flowers that lies; And winking Mary-buds begin to ope their golden eyes; With every thing that pretty is, my lady sweet arise: Arise, arise!

Common to both poems is the stress on dew, which Beddoes throws into focus by a rapt use of tmesis ("It is the dawn, my maiden, / It is the dewy dawn"), cradling the key adjective in a weave of repetition. The comprehensiveness of his inventory—"And every bird in every tree"; "every blossom"; "every leaf"—recalls (and inverts) the relentless listing in the "Nocturnal upon S. Lucy's Day, being the shortest day" ("All others, from all things, draw all that's good"11). Just as Donne had sung that mockserenade in winter, so Beddoes marries his aubade with the reverdie(spring song) in a dual celebration of life renewed. The narrow compass of the trimeters speeds up the tempo, and the canzone-like "chiavi" of the dimeters ("Yesterday" and "Through the air") create even more urgent strette at those junctures. The oxymoron "sunny rain" catches the fleeting point of transition between rain and the brightness that

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Chapter One

follows, and the distributive "every" diffuses vitality throughout the landscape: "Every leaf is shaken / With the joy of Spring." Music (ordinarily an undifferentiated collective) turns plural ("All the musics sing") to convey the various layers of the dawn chorus—frogs, insects, birds and mammals. The second stanza enters the dream of the mistress, who nestles passively within it ("Between the wings of sleep"), and occupies a world that fails to match the rich and vivid reality outside. Ordinarily dreams provide a heightened alternative to life—one thinks of how Caliban weeps at the discrepancy between them in The Tempest ("when I wak'd, / I cried to dream again"—3.2.140-41)—but here Beddoes presents conscious experience as something more complete: "Yet thou canst not be / Where showers can ever weep, / Within so green a forest." The lines recall Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn," except that in both of those, the alternative world of art trumps that of pain and mortality: "What thou among the leaves hast never known"12; "For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd, / For ever panting, and for ever young" (p. 210). They also overturn Sidney's claim that "the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow, in effect, into another nature, in making things . . . better than nature bringeth forth."13 Beddoes ends by despatching an envoi into the sleeper's consciousness and alerting her to the vivid world that awaits her levée: Waken then, ere this Does its clue unravel Through the air, By bee and bird its travel, Ending with a kiss On thy white ear, my fair. (pp. 4-5)

The speaker's kiss, while it might stop on the ear, will penetrate the dream as Porphyro penetrates Madeline's in The Eve of St Agnes, the contractive internal rhyme ("ear/fear") enacting that gentle ending.

“The New-Born Star. A Fragment" (p. 5) This poem, a verse cosmogony like those in Book I of Ovid's Metamorphoses and Book VII of Paradise Lost, differs from both in dispensing with the idea of a creative agent. Ovid, like the Babylonian mythographers who in turn influenced the book of Genesis, had presented creation as an act of segregation and securement—

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Hanc deus et melior litem natura diremit. nam caelo terras et terris abscidit undas et liquidum spisso secrevit ab aere caelum. quae postquam evolvit caecoque exemit acervo, dissociata locis concordi pace liagavit;14 [God—or kindlier Nature—composed this strife; for he rent asunder land from sky, and sea from land, and separated the ethereal heavens from the dense atmosphere. When thus he had released these elements and freed them from the blind heap of things, he set them each in its own place and bound them fast in harmony.] (pp. 3 and 5)

—and Milton followed suit, presenting the process as if it had the closure and fixity of a geometric theorem. The justness of God's "just Circumference" represents exactitude on the one hand and fittingness on the other: For Chaos heard his voice: him all his Train Follow'd in bright procession to behold Creation, and the wonders of his might. Then stay'd the fervid Wheels, and in his hand He took the golden Compasses, prepar'd In God's Eternal store, to circumscribe This Universe, and all created things: One foot he centred, and the other turn'd Round through the vast profundity obscure, And said, Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds, This be thy just Circumference, O World. (p. 351)

Beddoes's world, by contrast, is self-generating, and whereas in Paradise Lost, angels watch and applaud the process ("him all his Train / Follow'd in bright procession to behold / Creation"), and whereas Blake's star-spirits likewise witness the enterprise ("When the stars threw down their spears / And watered Heaven with their tears"15), this angel seems almost to have stumbled on the event by chance. His primary function, like that of the angelic repoussoirs in Renaissance pictures, is to establish perspective and centre the viewer's attention. The opening announcement ("An earth is born! an earth is born!") recalls Is. 9.6—"For unto us a child is born"—as if to remind us of the extrinsic purpose behind creation in the Judeo-Christian scheme of things, and to highlight the contrasting fact that this world is intrinsic to itself. We sense this in the rose metaphor that Beddoes has borrowed from Canto XXX of Dante's Paradiso—

16

Chapter One Nel giallo della rosa sempiterna, che si dilata ed ingrada e redole odor di lode al sol che sempre verna, [Into the yellow of the eternal rose, which expands and rises in ranks and exhales odours of praise to the Sun that makes perpetual spring,]16

—but modified to make it seem less static and composed. The bloom opens up before our eyes, and anticipates the acceleration of slow processes associated with stop-frame photography: Leaf after leaf, and glory under glory, He marked the golden rose Like a deep human life From little birth unto its core, the grave, Opening, wide, and fallen in story Itself unclose. (p. 5)

As in Donne's "Blossom," a "higher" consciousness here overarches the life of the subject, encompassing its history in a mere brace of lines— "Whom I have watched six or seven days, / And seen thy birth, and seen what every hour / Gave to thy growth" (p. 44). The angel, standing outside time, compresses geological aeons into a moment and makes it an evermore. Whereas in Paradise Lost God creates "ex nihilo"—for the "vast profundity" must have extension if it require limits to be set—Beddoes hangs his angel like a plumb-line above an intangible and immeasurable surge ("As o'er an unseen ocean"). His vertical stasis in the middle distance intensifies the restless energy beneath: "And in its bright expanding / Wondered at the infant star." Milton's creator had proceeded by fiat, but Beddoes, like Dryden, makes music the generative force: "From Harmony, from heav'nly Harmony / This universal Frame began."17 Dryden, however, still clung to the idea of an anthropic presence ("The tuneful Voice was heard from high") whereas Beddoes, swivelling between the transitive and the intransitive significations of "wakening," conceives his music as a force—one that spontaneously comes into existence and then causes other things to materialize: And from the breaking air A wakening music did unbind Its curls of pale invisible hair And in veins and rivers wind Round the crest and bosom fair

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Of the foundling world, fading away Into dumb spring as it fell through the day.

The antanaclasis of air=ether and air=melody creates an effect of clouds breaking to reveal the sun on the one hand, and of the world's breaking into song on the other. Beddoes evokes polyphonic strands of music through a metaphor of tresses, and, having emphasized its invisibility, leaves us to ponder whether gradations of tone—the figurative hair is "pale"—can indeed subsist in something unseen. Then he slips in yet another line of thought—the hair-like configuration of blood vessels no doubt derived from the root meaning of "capillary." So restless and wideranging is his analogical imagination that those veins shift almost at once into the waterways that course over the new world. Even so, we can't be sure if the angel observes actual rivers in the landscape evolving before him, or if the extended metaphor has simply thrown up the new allotrope of the hair/vein sequence, and still works in terms of the music that brings the world into being. That music is the only external force in Beddoes's cosmogony. "Foundling" implies the absence of a divine parent, and, with that, the process of external approval and certification at the heart of the Judeo-Christian myth ("and God saw that it was good"—Gen. 1.10)—not to mention the sense of a hierarchical ascent: "There wanted yet the Master work, the end / Of all yet done" (Paradise Lost, p. 359). Not only does "foundling" suggest the world's abandonment to an indifferent cosmos but it also hints at "floundering" and "founding," a typical instance of the poet's habit of agnominatio or analogical punning. This is apparent in the way "dumb spring," even as it extends the water metaphor, also introduces the sense of "spring"=propulsion, since the music spurs the unfolding of life. Beddoes's new world is paradisal, and carries no taint of death or corruption or sorrow, even though the fragment breaks off with a reference to its being "fallen in story." "Story" makes it clear that he views the fall something merely fabular, and that he was about to take issue with the Genesis myth.

“Alfarabi. The World-Maker. A rhapsodical fragment (p. 6) According to Kelsall, who based his claim on vanished graphological evidence, "Alfarabi" is a juvenile poem, "written in so boyish a hand that there could be no mistake in ascribing it to his last Charterhouse days."18 All subsequent scholars, from Gosse to John Haydn Baker, have weighed in with their assent, the latter remarking as recently as 2002 that the poem is "tentatively dated to around 1819."19 I am unconvinced, however, for

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not only does the verse texture differ from Beddoes's attested schoolboy productions (being austere and chastened, and altogether more sophisticated than "The Improvisatore"), but also because it seems unlikely that he would have even have heard of Al-Farabi in 1819. This philosopher, born in Turkestan in the ninth century CE, attempted to syncretize Islamic thought with that of Plato and Aristotle. His work, which one commentator commends for its "polyhistoric breadth,"20 included a treatise that "envisages a perfect city state as well as a perfect nation (umma) and a perfect world state."21 In that treatise, I'm sure, lies the key to Beddoes's choice of name, a name he is much more likely to have heard in Göttingen than at Charterhouse, and heard from someone who played an important part in his life: On October 6, 1826, there matriculated at Göttingen a young man who was soon to become Beddoes' friend. This was Benjamin Bernard Reich, the son of a Jewish banker at Bar in Podolia. We know nothing about him except what Beddoes tells us in his letters later, but it is significant that before the new year Beddoes had borrowed from the University Library a work on the Cabbalistic doctrines. It is difficult not avoid the conclusion that this young friend who had 'dug up a great deal of interesting matter relative to the Hebrew doctrine of immortality,' had inspired the choice of this book. (The Making of a Poet, p. 197)

I propose, therefore, that "Alfarabi" dates from this point of Beddoes's life, and that the philosopher's name probably came up in conversations with Reich, a student well versed in Semitic lore. Since these would have been conducted in German (and also, perhaps, in Latin), misprisions would have arisen, and it's possible that Beddoes, not realizing that Al-Farabi had written an Islamic version of The Republic, mistook it for a fantastical utopia. But it's more likely that, having indeed grasped the scope and purpose of the work, he saw nothing wrong with sending it up in a sprightly coup d'esprit. To this end, he seems to have incorporated data about Reich himself, data that, ex hypothesi, would place the poem several months into their friendship—say, January, 1827—when they had become sufficiently intimate for good-natured teasing. This also jibes with a datum in the prologue, viz., Beddoes's comment that he hasn't seen the sun "all this winter" (p. 6). Furthermore, if indeed there be bits of Reich in the bricolage the Alfarabi portrait, it follows that the fragment was intended for the man himself, memorializing the start of a significant friendship. Beddoes's letters show that Reich greatly impressed him, and Donner even goes so far as tentatively to identify him with the "loved longlost boy" (p. 111) of "Dream-Pedlary." If we take him to be "Alfarabi's" hypothetic dedicatee,

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we can explain the rounded penmanship that caused Kelsall to assign it to the poet's Charterhouse days, for this would have sprung from the need to write in a clear hand for someone better versed in the Hebrew and Cyrillic scripts—the lucid hand an outward and visible sign of a wish that the poem be grasped by a second-language speaker. "Alfarabi" would additionally have shown Reich that Beddoes was a fluent and brilliant poet. He had performed in the same way for the adoring Kelsall during the summer of 1823 in Southhampton: "So facile, says Kelsall, was his composition at this period of his authorship, that it often happened that in the evening he would take home some unfinished act of a drama and the next morning show Kelsall an entirely new one where the same theme was given a different treatment" (The Making of a Poet, p. 132). "Alfarabi" does indeed have the air of having been written at a sitting (as Keats dashed off poems after visits to Leigh Hunt). Perhaps Beddoes returned home from an evening with Reich, wrote into the small hours (conscious, like Ted Hughes in "The Thought Fox," of the brilliant winter sky beyond his window) and decided to centre the poem on the creation of a planet. Thrust into Reich's hands the next day, it would have served both as a friendship-offering and demonstration of creative power. For in 1827, Beddoes's verse was still flowing freely, and he was no doubt vain of his facility as productive people often tend to be (Donizetti boasted more than once of writing the final act of La Favorite in a night). Since, according to a note in Donner's edition, Kelsall supplied the title of the companion poem ("The world is born today"), can we infer that Beddoes himself provided the subtitle of "Alfarabi"? If so, it's significant that it should stress the improvisational nature of the exercise. When he wrote for Kelsall in Southampton, the surviving bits and pieces were all intended eventually to develop into bigger things, and were never tagged as fragments. "A rhapsodical fragment" might therefore signify a poème d'occasion never meant to be carried further once its memorializing work was done. Beddoes could have used the word "rhapsodical" not only to explain its formal disjunctiveness, but also to hint at the enthusiasm and delight that Reich's friendship inspired ("rhapsody" conceived as "elation" as well as "free form"). In any event, my suggested interpretative framework allows some puzzling details to fall into place. The first of these relates to the poem's national announcement—"I'm an Englishman" (my emphasis)—which seems both redundant and inappropriately mature for an English schoolboy, but which becomes more meaningful if we assume that the adult Beddoes is writing for a Russian friend. Nationalist taggings belong more naturally to such poems of exile

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as Browning's "Home Thoughts from Abroad." "Alfarabi" goes on to mock that nationality through an irrational attachment to cloudiness, long conceived on the continent as a typical "note" of the English climate: . . . and one cloud— Yes (I'm an Englishman), one snow-winged cloud To wander slowly down the trembling blue;

Just as Lord Warburton, trying to ascertain the reasons for his rejection, asks Isabel, "Are you afraid—afraid of the climate?"22 and just as in À Rebours, "abominably foggy and rainy weather" induces an impulse to visit England, and keeps "before [Esseintes'] eyes the picture of a land of mist and mud,"23 so Beddoes, blotting the Arcadian sky of his prologue with a cloud, sends up his native climate for the amusement of a Russian friend. But an additional irony might have been layered on to that phenomenon, for Reich must have informed Beddoes of an equivalent disadvantage to Odessa. A travelogue, Russians of the South (1854), remarks of the city that dust lies like a universal shroud of some two or three inches thick. The slightest breeze flings it over the town in clouds, the lightest footstep sends it flying high in dense heaps. When, therefore, I tell you that hundreds of the carriages of the places, driven at high speed . . . are perpetually racing about, and that the sea breezes are as perpetually rushing through the streets, the statement that Odessa lives in a cloud is no figure of speech.24

This motif of bad weather recurs when Alfarabi puffs "from his pipe a British climate round" (p. 10) his new world. Since pipes produce dry, acrid smoke rather than moist, and since "sidus" can mean "weather" as well as "star," the name of his creation ("Georgium Sidus") might also glance at the dust clouds of the Black Sea. Although Beddoes identifies the new world with Uranus—"It chanc'd a bearded sage espied it's sweep, / And named it GEORGIUM SIDUS"—Georgius could refer to the patron saint of Georgia (geographical neighbour of Reich's Ukraine) as well as to Herschel's patron. Since, like most eighteenth-century gentlemen, that astronomer had no facial hair, Beddoes seems to have superimposed upon him the image of Reich, almost certainly bearded, and most certainly a sage. When, decades later, Beddoes sat for the Tobler portrait in something approximating a kaftan, did he mean to memorialize his friend's gabardine? Be that as it may, the fluid and improvisatory nature of the poem—a "rhapsodical fragment," after all—facilitates the traffic in fragmentary, half-realized allusions. Baker finds irony in the "contrast

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between Alfarabi's bright new world and the pitiful condition of the English monarchy—and monarch—in 1819. Compared with the unimaginably distant Uranus 'like some great ruinous dream of broken worlds, / Tumbling through heaven', both the 'old, mad, blind, despised and dying King' and those who cynically hold him up for reverence are indeed doubly insignificant" (p. 47). For my part, though, I see no "bright new world" in the "ruinous dream," cobbled up as it is by "tongs, and trowels, needles, scissors, paste, / Solder and glue" (p. 9). Alfarabi's world seems all too continuous with the one we know, and its very atmosphere—hinting both at the cloud-cover of the British Isles and the haze over Odessa—points to that shared deficiency. There can be no doubt that Beddoes means that cloud to signify the presence of life on Uranus, a deduction made from an atmosphere closer to home: "Believing that Venus' proximity to the Sun would make it warmer than Earth, and encouraged by the discovery of a thick atmosphere by Mikhail Lomonosov in the 18th century, astronomers once imagined a lush carboniferous forest beneath the Venusian clouds."25 Even if Herschel's telescope had been too weak to reveal the colour of his new world's atmosphere—Sparrow observes that "From Earth, astronomers can discern Uranus as little more than a tiny, indistinct blue-green circle" (p. 187)—he would certainly have entertained the possibility of its being swathed in cloud. Any attempt to link Beddoes and Reich by the cloudiness of their countries remains suppositious, but one treads on firmer ground when guessing that, as the son of a banker, Reich had chosen a course of cultural assimilation. He must have begun his education at one of the many private schools in Odessa ("including special primary schools for Catholics, Armenians, Germans, and Jews"—Zipperstein, p. 29), and then progressed to the Richelieu Lyceum, which had "opened in 1817, and transformed into the New Russia University in 1865." But even in the comparatively liberal enclave of Odessa, he would not have escaped the scourge of Russian Judeophobia. Zipperstein informs us that, nine years after Reich's arrival in Göttingen, there were only 11 Jews in the 2,000-strong student population at Russian universities. Alexander I's Statute of 1804 had attempted to alleviate their plight, but its articles weren't always upheld, and, in addition to "a numerus clausus for secondary and university students" (p. 10), conversion to Orthodoxy was sometimes made a necessary condition for graduation, as witness the case of Simon Wolf. John Klier points out that no Jew, emerging from the traditional Jewish school system, with its emphasis upon the study of the Talmud, would have been qualified to seek admission to a Russian institution of higher learning, nor, ordinarily, would

22

Chapter One he have wanted to. On the other hand, the Russian state showed itself completely mystified when confronted with the anomaly of a Russian Jew with a university degree. After a Jewish native of Kurlandia province, Simon Wolf (Vul'f), completed the requirements for the advanced degree of Candidate in Law at Derpt University in 1816, the Faculty Council refused his request to pursue the doctoral degree in law, and this decision was upheld by the Russian Council of Ministers, in clear violation of article 5 of the statute.26

If Reich found himself in a position similar to Wolf's on graduating, it would have made sense for him to opt for further medical studies in Göttingen, not least because the Jewish Enlightenment had originated in Germany. This movement, also called the Haskalah, denounced "aspects of contemporary Jewish life at variance with the beliefs of the larger society (and presumably with the true character of Judaism as well), such as mystical speculation, disdain for secular study, and ignorance of the vernacular" (Zipperstein, p. 11). But even though he had escaped the ghetto, Reich still commanded an impressive knowledge of Semitic lore, no doubt honouring the Mendelssohnian dictum that one should "Be a Jew at home, but a man in the street" (qtd. Klier, p. 50). Beddoes, we should remember, calls Alfarabi "an antiquary sage" (p. 7). At the same time, however, Reich must have regarded that lore with scepticism, as witness his dispassionate notes on the Luz bone, and the detail of Alfarabi's having risen above finicky mediaeval chop logic as had his fellow Maskilim (enlightened Jews): "'Twas not by Logic, reader; / Her and her crabbed sister, Metaphysics, / Left he to wash Thought's shirt." Beddoes seems to acknowledge this independence, teasing and saluting his friend in the same breath: A man renowned in the newspapers: He wrote in two reviews; raw pork at night He ate, and opium; kept a bear at college. A most extraordinary man was he. But he was not one satisfied with man, As man has made himself: he thought this life Was something deeper than a jest, and sought Into its roots: himself was his best science.

Here some opaque details let through light if we allow them to refer to Reich rather than to the real Al-Farabi, for it's unthinkable that a Syrian Muslim feasted on raw pork or kept a bear at college (not a Mohammedan institution, after all). Surely this must be an in-joke like the allusion to

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Richard in Chapter 1 of Northanger Abbey—one based on revelations that Reich had made about his student days in Odessa. The bear, not being a denizen of the Syrian desert, inevitably turns one's thoughts toward Russia. Did Reich keep one pour épater les professeurs while studying at the Lyceum Richelieu? That, at least, is geographically plausible—more plausible, than Beddoes's having kept one at Pembroke College, where bears would have been in shorter supply and the dons altogether more discouraging. Byron certainly kept a bear in his rooms at Trinity, an eccentricity that, had he heard of it, might have inspired Reich to emulation. Be that as it may, it certainly seems possible that an enlightened Jew would have flaunted his indifference to the various dietary laws by ostentatiously eating raw pork, for traditionalists viewed the Maskilim as necessarily lax in such matters. Zipperstein notes that in 1879 Reuven Kulisher thought "the most apt symbol for the Russian Haskalah would be a picture of a Jew on a liquor barrel with a sausage in his hands" (p. 19). Once again, since pork-eating, even rare-pork-eating, is not likely to have raised eyebrows at Oxford, Beddoes can't have had himself in mind. Finally, the claim that Alfarabi's work had appeared in two reviews makes no sense if we apply it to Beddoes, already a published poet in 1819, but what if those journals had been Russian ones, and what if Reich had secured publication, his Jewish surname notwithstanding, in the face of relentless prejudice? If Alfarabi is Benjamin Reich in part, he seems, like Beddoes, to have rejected orthodox creationism, believing that humankind to have evolved from within itself by force of biologic law and not by the fiat of a deity: "But he was not satisfied with man, / As man has made himself." His dissatisfaction with what "man has made himself" not only denies the dogma of the fall, but all calls into question the comfortable Augustan belief, ex Leibniz, that we inhabit the best of all possible worlds: All Discord, Harmony, not understood; All partial Evil, universal Good: And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason's spite, One truth is clear, 'Whatever IS, is RIGHT.'27

Rejecting, as all Radicals must, the conservatism of the status quo, Alfarabi seeks alternative truth through self-interrogation—"himself was his best science." Beddoes's point of departure here is an aphorism in "An Essay on Man"—"Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of Mankind is Man" (Pope, p. 516)—a study limited to "nosce teipsum." Alfarabi, on the other hand, pursues transcendent knowledge in a way that recalls Keats's divinization of Apollo:

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"Knowledge enormous makes a God of me."28 The near solipsism of the reflexive structure—"himself was his best science"—also recalls Paradise Lost, where Milton encloses Satan in an inescapable capsule of godlessness: "Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell" (p. 279). Beddoes uses that parallel to create a continuity between the two figures, both of them trying to reverse a given scheme of things. Alfarabi's enterprise resembles, in fact, the venture upon which Beddoes and Reich were both engaged in 1827, as witness this letter from Göttingen: I am now so thoroughly penetrated with the conviction of the absurdity &unsatisfactory nature of human life that I search with avidity for every shadow of a proof or probability of an after-existence, both in the material & immaterial nature of man. Those people, perhaps they are few, are greatly to be envied who believe, honestly and from conviction, in the Xtian doctrines: but really in the New T. it is difficult to scrape together hints of a doctrine of immortality. Man appears to have found out this secret for himself, & it is certainly the best part of all religion and philosophy, the only truth worth demonstrating: an anxious question full of hope & fear & promise, for wh Nature appears to have appointed one solution—Death. (Works, p. 629)

Proofs of immortality had been sought no less by alchemists than by orthodox theologians, and Beddoes locates himself and Reich (conscripted to supply data about the Luz bone) at the interface of science and superstition. Aware of this doubtful position, the poet mocks Alfarabi's venture even as he affirms its energy and prowess, presenting him both as a Don Quixote and a Faust: He touched the springs, the unheeded hieroglyphics Deciphered; like an antiquary sage Within an house of office, which he takes For druid temple old, here he picked up A tattered thought, and turned it o'er and o'er 'Till it was spelled; the names of all the tenants, Pencilled upon the wall, he would unite Until he found the secret and the spell Of life.

This recalls the faint praise with which Bacon had damned antiquaries in The Advancement of Learning: Antiquities or Remnants of History are, as was said, tamquam tabula naufragii, when industrious persons by an exact and scrupulous diligence

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and observation, out of monuments, names, words, proverbs, traditions, private records and evidences, fragments of stories, passages of books that concern not story, and the like, do save and recover somewhat from the deluge of time. In these kinds of unperfect histories I do assign no deficience and therefore any deficience in them is but their nature.29

But Beddoes goes beyond the sense of mere "deficience," anticipating rather that point in The Pickwick Papers where a "small broken stone, partially buried in the ground, in front of a cottage-door,"30 elicits from the hero "ninety-six pages of very small print, and twenty-seven different readings of the inscription [BILL STUMPS, HIS MARK]" (p. 148). In much the same way, Beddoes's antiquary finds arcana in the context of a commonplace building, a phenomenon that we would now term epiphenia. I'm not certain what is meant by a "house of office." Perhaps, remembering the Duchess of Gloucester's lament about "unpeopled offices" in Richard II 1.2.69, the poet has an empty mansion in mind, but it seems more probable that he was thinking about a commercial or administrative structure. Neither construction, however, permits any connection with Druidry. Beddoes seems to hint that the project in which Reich has joined him is as misplaced as the antiquary's. In his effort to harmonize religious dogmas of resurrection with the data of empirical science, in searching for vestigia of immortality "both in the material & immaterial nature of man," he himself has mysticized the body—in essence simply a physiological "house of office"—in the manner of 1 Cor 6.19: "know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own." Searching his inner self, Alfarabi both construes meaning ("spells" in the orthographic sense), and conjures with it ("spells" in the necromantic): . . . here he picked up A tattered thought, and turned it o'er and o'er 'Till it was spelled; the names of all the tenants, Pencilled upon the wall, he would unite Until he found the secret and the spell Of life.

As so often, Beddoes fuses the tenor and the vehicle, for if we foreground the "druid temple old," the names "pencilled on the wall" register as genuinely mystic inscriptions; but if, acknowledging that the sage has mistaken his subject, we emphasize the "house of office," they can be only a roster of room allocations, as banal as Catherine Morland's laundry list or the mark of Bill Stumps that so excites Mr Pickwick. Either Alfarabi is

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self-deluded, an antiquary manqué who can't distinguish between runes and a directory of office occupants, or he has found a way of unlocking the meaning in an archaeological relic—or both. Examining his unconscious, he seems to find proof of metempsychosis, "the names of all the tenants" or, in other words, the former occupants of body-temple/house of office. In addition to alchemy and astrology, both of which professed to link "the material and the immaterial nature of man," other kinds of mediaeval speculation would have occurred to Beddoes as fields of enquiry. One of these, Macrobius' Commentary on the Dream of Scipio had regularized a system of "knowledge" from the irrational materials of the unconscious. When, therefore, we learn that Alfarabi . . . knew the soul would free itself in sleep From her dull sister, bear itself away, Freer than air: to guide it with his will,

we can assume that he's connected the "personal" dream of the Macrobian typology ("when one dreams that he himself is doing or experiencing something"31) with its "universal" counterpart ("when he dreams that some change has taken place in the sun, moon, planets, sky, or regions of the earth"—p. 90). This cosmic roaming comes into focus as the poem unfolds—for it's a vision poem after a kind, though hardly visionary. Lacking Blake's prophetic earnestness, Beddoes often distances Alfarabi's quest for subconscious knowledge, but remains open to the possibility of its being there for the finding. Like Coleridge and Wordsworth before him, he assumes that meaning is generated by the subject, a conviction that, as M. H. Abrams points out, goes back to The Enneads: "If Plato was the main source of the philosophical archetype of the reflector, Plotinus was the chief begetter of the archetype of the projector; and both the romantic theory of knowledge and the romantic theory of poetry can be accounted the remote descendants of this root-image of Plotinian philosophy."32 Light is the root-image of that root-image in turn, and the strata of Plotinus' layered universe subsist in the degrees of its intensity: All the souls, then, shine down upon the heavens and spend there the main of themselves and the best; only their lower phases illuminate the lower realms; and those souls which descend deepest show their light furthest down—not themselves the better for the depth to which they have penetrated.33

If we place this alongside "Alfarabi"—"By his own mind, / The lamp that never fails us, dared we trust it, / He read the mystery"—the parallel becomes clear, but with one crucial difference. For whereas Plotinus

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ascribes a deciphering power to an inner light, it originates in an external "Absolute" light— the Soul is at rest—in rest firmly based on Repose, the Absolute—yet, as we may put it, that huge illumination of the Supreme pouring outwards comes at last to the extreme bourne of its light and dwindles to darkness; this darkness, now lying there beneath, the soul sees and by seeing brings to shape; for in the law of things this ultimate depth, neighbouring with soul, may not go void of whatsoever degree of that Reason-Principle it can absorb, the dimmed reason of reality at its faintest. (p. 147)

—Beddoes locates it exclusively within. In Wordsworth, the mind supplements the "Supreme pouring outwards"—"An auxiliar light / Came from my mind, which on the setting sun / Bestowed new splendour"34— and all but cancels out the sense of self: "Hence my obeisance, my devotion hence, my transport" (p. 507). But for Beddoes, enlightenment inheres not in self-abjection but in a resolute and defiant trust in one's own power: "The lamp that never fails us, dared we trust it." "Alfarabi's" unique flavour derives from the way it marries sceptical empiricism with extravagant pre-Baconian thought, and from the accompanying tonal marriage of jest and earnestness: For, one night, By the internal vision he saw Sleep Just after dinner tapping at the door Of his next neighbour, the old alderman. Sleep rode a donkey with a pair of wings, And, having fastened the ethereal bridle Unto the rails, walked in. Now, Alfarabi! Leap, Alfarabi! There! The saddle's won: He kicks, he thwacks, he spurs—the donkey flies. On soared they, like the bright thought of an eye, Along the infinity of elements. First through the azure meads of night and day Among the rushing of the million flames They passed the bearded dragon-star, unchained From Hell, (of old its sun,) flashing her way Upon those wings, compact of mighty clouds (p. 7)

If we find a scintilla of elevation here, it's because Beddoes seems to recall "The Sons of Genius" ("Or on Newtonian wings sublime to soar / Through the bright regions of the starry sky"35)—Humphry Davy having been infatuated with Anna Beddoes, who almost certainly discussed the

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scientist with her son—and because he definitely remembers the homage paid to Epicurus in De Rerum Natura: ergo vivida vis animi pervicit, et extra processit longe flammantia moenia mundi atque omne immensum peragravit mente animoque, unde refert nobis victor quid possit oriri, quid nequeat, finita potestas denique cuique quanam sit ratione atque alte terminus haerens. [Therefore the lively power of his mind prevailed, and forth he marched far beyond the faming walls of heaven, as he traversed the immeasurable universe in thought and imagination; whence victorious he returns bearing his prize, the knowledge of what can come into being, and what can not . . .]36

At the same time, however, Alfarabi breaches the "flammantia moenia" of the universe on a donkey, an animal that brings Sancho Panza to mind: "With regard to the ass, Don Quixote paused a little: endeavouring to recollect whether any knight-errant had ever carried a squire mounted on ass-back; but no instance of this kind occurred to his memory."37 The donkey also recalls Balaam, and Beddoes would certainly have known that "Balaam" was "the cant name for asinine paragraphs about monstrous productions of nature and the like kept standing in type to be used whenever the real news of the day leaves an awkward space that must be used up somehow."38 The poet has endowed his verse with a striking force and kinetic immediacy at this point. Browning would have admired the way the external action breaks in with a deictic gesture—"Now, Alfarabi! / Leap, Alfarabi! There! The saddle's won"—a moment that looks ahead to "Andrea del Sarto" ("Again the Cousin's whistle! Go, my Love"39) and the "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" ("He-he! There his lily snaps!"—p. 20). At the same time, Beddoes also glances back at the "Ode to a Nightingale": "Already with thee! Tender is the night" (p. 208). The energy of Alfarabi's mounting almost makes us forget that his steed is an ass, albeit a winged one—a detail that owes something to Pegasus on the one hand, and to Cambus Kahn on the other. Beddoes would have read the paraphrase of "The Squire's Tale," Canto 1, that Hunt published in The Liberal (1823)—additional evidence for my post-Charterhouse dating of the poem, for there Chaucer's eagle simile—"Or, if yow list to fleen as hye in the air / As dooth an egle whan hym list to soore"40—is replaced with the idea of mental process: "The thing is like a thought, and cuts the air / So smoothly, and well observes the track."41 The parallel with Beddoes's

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"like a bright thought," especially since each evokes a winged animal, is too striking to be coincidental. Just as the ass half-mocks a Promethean journey through the universe, so too does the alderman who lives next door mock Alfarabi himself, for the detail's as banal as the diet of pork. One can trace him back to Shakespeare's Mercutio, who, unlike Beddoes's sage, distrusts the "knowledge" imparted by dreams ("I talk of dreams, / Which are the children of an idle brain,/ Begot of nothing but vain fantasy"), and who compares Queen Mab to "an agate stone / On the forefinger of an alderman" (Romeo and Juliet 1.4.55-56). But even though that alderman sounds a satiric note, Beddoes writes his inset hodoiporikon with the energy and commitment. In addition to giving us a glimpse of Epicurus, he also brings to mind the quest of Satan in Paradise Lost and Milton's own imaginative journeys as Gray had rendered them in "The Progress of Poesy": "Nor second he, that rode sublime / Upon the seraph-wings of Ecstasy, / The secrets of the abyss to spy."42 This derives from the moment in Paradise Lost when Satan addresses Chaos and Night, "Powers / And Spirits of this nethermost Abyss": "I come no Spy, / With purpose to explore or to disturb / The secrets of your Realm" (p. 255). Both passages subtend Alfarabi's encounter with "the bearded dragon-star"—not the constellation Draco but rather a comet, which phenomena (along with meteorites) folklore had traditionally conceived as dragons: Dust and smoke from meteorite impacts would account for the climatic disturbances. Mike Baillie, a paleontologist at Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, points out that the event roughly coincides with the writing of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, which describes a firebreathing dragon that was blighting the land of the Geat people. (Sparrow, p. 253)

An engraving (undated in my source, though the typeface suggests the late fifteenth or early sixteenth centuries) similarly depicts a meteorite as a "Serpens cum ceruleis pedibus" (Sparrow, p. 253): Among the rushing of the million flames They passed the bearded dragon-star, unchained From Hell, (of old its sun,) flashing her way Upon those wings, compact of mighty clouds Bloodshot and black or flaring devilish light, Whose echo racks the shrieking universe, Whose glimpse is tempest. (pp. 7-8)

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Many imaginative strokes intensify our sense of the comet's monstrosity— the clash between "bearded" and "her," which recalls Banquo's bafflement ("You should be women, / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so"—Macbeth 1.2. 45-47); the aposematic mixture of red and black; and the fleeting hints of sound and fury ("echo"; "glimpse") rendered by violently absolute language ("racks"; "tempest")—Beddoes's way of intimating that "human kind / Cannot bear very much reality."43 If we set the vigour and slancio of these lines against "The Comet" (1819), the poet's first published effort, we find nearly conclusive stylistic evidence that "Alfarabi" was written a long while after it. Instead of flexible blank verse, and the appositive congeries of phrases and clauses enacting the comet's compacture of its parts, we have blank anapaestic tetrameters. Equally feeble is the thin, assertive patriotism (though this might itself be parodic), far removed from the ironized nationality in the "Alfarabi" prologue: In vain frowned the demon, 'Still terror I'll try, And the envoy of Yamen shall fleet through the sky.' But while virtue and justice in Britain remain, The fire-brand of Yamen shall dazzle in vain. (p. 51)

The "Alfarabi" comet, so much more arresting and furious, seems to have originated in an experience of locomotives. It's significant, therefore, that the first passenger railway (from Stockton to Darlington) began running in 1825, one year before my putative redating of "Alfarabi" and six after "The Comet." Compare such lines as these—"compact of mighty clouds / Bloodshot and black or flaring devilish light, / Whose echo racks the shrieking universe"—with the train in Dombey and Son: The ground shook, the house rattled, the fierce impetuous rush was in the air! He felt it come up, and go darting by; and even when he had hurried to the window, and saw what it was, he stood, shrinking from it, as if it were not safe to look. A curse upon the fiery devil, thundering along so smoothly, tracked through the distant valley by a glare of light and lurid smoke, and gone! He felt as if he had been plucked out of its path, and saved from being torn asunder.44

But let's return to Alfarabi's journey and observe how the violent commotion of the comet yields to the silence and immobility of outer space, which Beddoes images as a Roc-like halcyon, calming a universal sea. At the same time, however, it is that sea—a typically dichotomous vehicle that holds its contradictories in an unresolved tension:

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O'er each silent star Slept like a tomb that dark, marmoreal bird, That spellbound ocean, Night—her breast o'erwrit With golden secrecies. All these he passed One after one: as he who stalks by night With the ghost's step, the shaggy murderer Leaves passed the dreamy city's sickly lamps. Then through the horrid twilight did they plunge, The universe's suburbs; dwelling dim Of all that sin and suffer; midnight shrieks Upon the water when no help is near; (p. 8)

Here the images slide into each other in a proto-Symboliste way, their associative contiguity eluding complete fixture and explication. Night is like a tomb in its deathly silence, but is both an ocean anda dark bird, brooding stars as Herbert's spirit broods eggs in "Whitsunday": And spread thy golden wings in me; Hatching my tender heart so long, Till it get wing, and flie away with thee.45

Almost at once, however, the bird becomes a sculpture on a grave, its black marble a contrast to the Parian more usually favoured for tombstone doves. The stars, initially registered as eggs beneath the breast of night, turn into inscriptions—gold-leaf epitaphs on the tomb, perhaps, or cabbalistic signs on the cloak of a magician. Beddoes often constructs his image chains by enharmonic modulation, slipping by redefinition from one key to another wholly remote from it. They resemble similar effects in the work of Hieronymus Bosch—clearly an instance of convergent evolution, since Beddoes wouldn't have known that artist. Alfarabi moves next through the "universe's suburbs; dwelling dim / Of all that sin and suffer." Nineteenth-century suburbs, far different from their leafy counterparts today, were a no-man's land between the metropolitan centre and the countryside proper, and, as The Old Curiosity Shop shows, places of squalor and disorder: Again this quarter passed, they came upon a straggling neighbourhood, where the mean houses parcelled off in rooms, and windows patched with rags and paper, told of the populous poverty that sheltered there.46

Like Dickens after him, Beddoes foregrounds elements of distress and disquiet. We follow the soundtrack of fitfully glimpsed events, and the very absence of sound in the phrase "muffled in thick flesh" indicates the

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depth to which a sword has penetrated a body and prevented the victim's cry: And there were sounds of wings, broken and swift; Blows of wrenched poniards, muffled in thick flesh; Struggles and tramplings wild, splashes and falls And inarticulate yells from human breasts. Nought was beheld: but Alfarabi's heart Turned in his bosom like a scorched leaf, And his soul faded. (p. 8)

Does this conspectus of suffering equip Alfarabi for his imminent creation of a world? Has knowledge enormous (in the sense of "enormity" as well as "enormousness") indeed made a god of him? And does his soul lose power or cease existence altogether? "Fade" could be taken either way. Whatever reading one might favour, there can be no doubt that the hero has here been reconstituted, and that we have shifted from comedy to the macabre sublime. During his stay at Göttingen, Beddoes discovered the German Romantics, some of whom went in for capriciously steep tonal twists and turns. As Richard Will remarks, Beethoven's Third Symphony introduces such great emotional contrasts into its scenes of conflict and celebration that it was associated with the Humor of Jean Paul, a style of radical juxtaposition that in its sheer wilfulness emphasized the actions of not of the characters so much as of the authorial presence guiding their representation.47

Wilfulness is also the "note" of Friedrich Schlegel's reflections on irony, a mode in which soll alles Scherz und alles Ernst sein, alles treuherzig offen und alles tief verstellt. Sie entspringt aus der Vereinigung von Lebenskunstsinn und wissenschaftlichem Geist, aus dem Zusammentreffen vollendeter Naturphilosophie und vollendeter Kunstphilsosphie. Sie enthält und erregt ein Gefühl von unauflölischen Widerstreit des Unbedingten und des Bedingten, der Unmöglichkeit und Notwendigkeit einer vollständigen Mitteilung.48 [all should be jestful and all should be earnest, everything candidly open and everything deeply disguised. It originates in the union of experiential aestheticism with the scientific spirit, in the interface of perfect naturalism and perfect artifice. It encompasses, and indeed generates, a sense of the insoluble conflict of the indeterminate with the determined, a sense of how impossible and yet how necessary it is that they should comprehensively interact.]

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Schlegel presents irony as the endless interaction ("Mitteilung"= "communication") of irreconcilable positions, similar to those behind the tonal lurches and swivelling stances of "Alfarabi." The dark tone of the suburban journey darkens still more in the "landscape" painting that follows it. Once again Beddoes has extrapolated from urban experience, this time the wastelands for which Dickens provides further documentary evidence: "a tract of urban Sahara, where tiles and bricks were burnt, bones were boiled, carpets were beat, rubbish was shot, dogs were fought, and dust was heaped by contractors."49 This surreal cosmic desert centres on a textural catachresis we also find in Bosch and Dali, for just as the watches in The Persistence of Memory share the fixity of worked metal surfaces with the malleability of their working, so here the sun, which nineteenth-century science viewed as a "burning coal" (Sparrow, p. 37), turns to wormy windfall. Beddoes extends the tapinosis still further, throwing the star on a scrapheap with others like it. Did he perhaps conceive the possibility of many solar systems a century before astronomers tumbled to that realization? Not only does the sun lie rotting among its fallen counterparts but the sublime intangibility of thunder and lightning also dwindle to dribbles of paint. Keats's phrase "solution sweet" (p. 205) echoes palimpsestically in "confusion strange," and sharpens the mockery of the phrase: Sky was there was none, Nor earth, nor water: but confusion strange; Mountainous ribs and adamantine limbs Of bursten worlds, and brazen pinions vast Of planets ship-wrecked; many a wrinkled sun Ate to the core by worms, with lightnings crushed And drossy bolts, melting like noonday snow. (p. 9)

This junkyard of creation is also a junkyard of creation myths. Beddoes throws together the Greek story of Titans and Olympians and the Hebrew one of fallen angels, the "gods that struggled for the throne of light" referring to the first of these, and the "cerulean battlements" to the "Battlements adorn'd / Of living Sapphire" (p. 257) in Book II of Paradise Lost. Paradise Lost has also influenced the depiction of "the Universe's death," since Milton was apparently the first poet to deconstruct the trope of prosopopoeia, unseaming its human outline, and making it vector the inconceivable. But whereas he figures Death as a "shape / If shape it might be call'd that shape had none / Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb" (p. 248), Coleridge takes the strategy to a point ne plus ultra. "The Rime

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of the Ancient Mariner" disables any visualization of the topic: "Is that a DEATH? And are there two? / Is DEATH that woman's mate."50 Beddoes shows a debt to both masters in a conception at once blank and amorphic: And 'mid them all a living mystery, A shapeless image, or a vision wrapt In clouds, and guessed at by its fearful shade; Most like a ghost of the eternal flame, An indistinct and unembodied horror Which prophecies have told of; not wan Death, Nor War the bacchanal of blood, nor Plague The purple beast, but their great serpent-sire, Destruction's patriarch, (dread name to speak!) The End of all, the Universe's Death. At that dread, ghostly thing, the atmosphere And light of the world's black charnel house, Low bowed the Archimage, and thrice his life Upraised its wing for passage; but the spell Prevailed, and to his purposed task he rose. (p. 9)

Here the figure of acervatio, which heaps up descriptive phrases, flails in a void, and, instead of generating generous abundance, takes language to the brink of non-meaning. Since it's impossible to conceive the ghost of an already impalpable flame, Beddoes drives his simile to the point of incoherence, acting out the impossibility of an "indistinct and unembodied horror." His apocalypse, like the biblical one, drives toward disclosure; but whereas in the book of Revelation, "end" in the sense of "terminus" is "redeemed by "end" in the sense of "purpose" ("I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end"), "Alfarabi" reverses the emphases, offering death as its own teleology: "The End of all, the Universe's Death." As the sage begins to fashion his world in the teeth of this nihilism, Beddoes veers from the Miltonic sublime to a comic mode that becomes broader and broader as the fragment draws to a close. It is possible that he has taken as his point of departure the magic idealism of Novalis in which, according to Anne Harrex, The inner world is a microcosm of the divine; the essence of philosophy is morality; the moral world of the Ichcorresponds to the moral outer world of nature—"Die Welt ist ein Universaltropus des Geistes, ein symbolisches Bild desselben", he later wrote—thus, as Novalis interprets and develops the concept, mastery of one's own Ich is mastery of the whole external world."51

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While this rampant subjectivism might have engaged one pole of Beddoes's being, it would without doubt have amused the "murderously" dissective scientist within him. And if he did in indeed have Novalis in mind, he mocks his high-flown dissolution of Diesseits into Jenseits in the mechanical nature of Alfarabi's creation. The forge metaphor, for example, notwithstanding its presence in Blake's sublime "Tiger" ("What the anvil? What dead grasp / Dare its deadly terrors clasp?"52), centres on an insoluble discord between the artisan's tool-driven repertoire of forms and the self-unfolding nature of an organism: At that dread, ghostly thing, the atmosphere And light of this the world's black charnel house, Low bowed the Archimage, and thrice his life Upraised its wing for passage; but the spell Prevailed, and to his purposed task he rose. He called unto the dead and the swart powers, That wander unconfined beyond the sight Or thought of mortals; and, from the abyss Of cavernous deep night, came forth the hands, That dealt the mallet when this world of ours Lay quivering on the anvil in its ore,—Hands of eternal stone, which would unmesh And fray this starry company of orbs, As a young infant on a dewy morn Rends into nought the tear-hung gossamer.

The ambiguous phrasing permits us either to view the earth itself as a charnel house, or to apply the metaphor to the wasteland of rotting suns and grounded lightning. Either way, it explains the dystopic nature of Alfarabi's new world. The upraised "wing for passage" is similarly ambiguous. Does it refer to Alfarabi's failure, three times over, to commit suicide in the face of the horror, or does he make three attempts to flee the task in hand? Whatever the meaning, the spell that detains him must relate to his earlier mastery of "the secret and the spell / Of life" (p. 7). Beddoes probably found inspiration here in Ovid's Medea, since she, too, controls the earth, the sun and the moon: 'O night,' she prayed, 'most faithful guardian of my secrets, and golden stars, who, with the moon, succeed the brightness of the day, goddess Hecate, triple-formed, you who ever know my undertakings, and come to aid me, spells and magic arts and you, O earth, the source of the magician's powerful herbs: you too, breezes and winds, mountains, rivers and lakes, all spirits of the groves and of the night, be present!53

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But instead of summoning the usual spirits and ministers of witchcraft, Alfarabi conjures up hands of stone that, if compared with half-glimpsed, indeterminate metonymy ("fairy hands" and "forms unseen"54) strike a bizarre note. Stone is so palpable that we are forced to imagine massive amputated members, and this further nudges the poem from the sublime toward the grotesque. Just as Beddoes had earlier blurred the distinction between a "house of office" and a "druid temple old," so here he couches a magical enterprise in the language of commerce ("hands, and Co."): —To work they went, magician, hands, and Co., With tongs, and trowels, needles, scissors, paste, Solder and glue, to make another world:

Not only are dark forces incorporated into a company but mallets and anvils soon yield to "tongs, and trowels, needles, scissors, paste, / Solder and glue," while reductive similes link Alfarabi to tinkers and housewives. His new world is nothing more our own repatched, a "stew-pan ruinous" and "small-clothes" with a "gaping wound." The figure of exergasia throws various unflattering comparisons at the topic in a way that recalls The Rape of the Lock: Not louder Shrieks to pitying Heav'n are cast, When Husbands or when Lap-dogs breath their last, Or when rich China vessels, fal'n from high, In glittring Dust and painted Fragments lie! (p. 231)

In Beddoes's version, roughness displaces rococo lap dogs and blue-andwhite, and widens still further the gulf between the mock-heroic components—the poem, after all, is about a new world, not the theft of a lock. Gammer Gurton's Needle would have supplied Beddoes with the right note of coarse improvisation, for it's full of stop-gap remedies ("Hie me to Sim Glover's shop, there to seek for a thong, / Therewith this breech to tache and tie as ich may"55). Also, by dragging us in the direction of hooks, eyes and hems, the allusion prepares us for the frivolities of mere fashion into which, in the last resort, Alfarabi's creation descends. At this point one encounters additional evidence for redating of the poem, for Beddoes had grown up in an era when the "waist-line was at its highest . . . and . . . very gradually slid down to normal,"56—and when one "fundamental item in women's clothing was remarkable for its absence . . . the corset. With the coming of the simple clinging little dresses of the French Directoire, literally everything was abandoned which had previously seemed to enhance a lady's charms" (p. 160). By contrast, in

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the late 1820s "the waist became increasingly small until an hour-glass figure was attained" (p. 175). The fact, therefore, that Alfarabi's world is laced "all behind to keep it tight," recalling the corset restored in 1827, pushes the poem further into the century than 1819. Beddoes's "official" dating of the new world, however, is 1781—the year in which Herschel discovered Uranus. This is a joke, of course, a nonce inspiration like so much else in this impulse-driven poem. The simile connecting Georgium Sidus with a pin-impaled button no doubt prompted memories of the platelike rings of Saturn (Uranus' neighbour), and suggested in turn the glide from Herschel to Alfarabi. There is an odd discordance between the mid-air dangle of the poem's end and its informal-formal prologue. Beddoes here takes his cue from the Byron of Don Juan rather than of "The Giaour," which left its mark on the "Leopold" Fytte of "The Improvisatore." While the "Byronic" Byron was obviously meat and drink to the poet's adolescent sensibility, his satiric avatar clearly appealed to the mature poet of the Göttingen years. Look at the deft way in which the spirit of Don Juan— 'Twas on a summer's day—the sixth of June:— I like to be particular in dates Not only of the age, and year, but moon; They are a sort of post-house, where the Fates Change horses, making history change its tune, Then spur away o'er empires and o'er states, Leaving at last not much besides chronology, Excepting the post-obits of theology.57

—is captured at the start of "Alfarabi": 'Twas in those days That never were, nor ever shall be, reader, But on this paper; golden glorious days, Such as the sun (poor fellow! by the way, Where is he? I've not seen him all this winter,) Never could spin: days, as I said before, Which shall be made as fine as ink can make them; (p. 6)

Beddoes's disenchantment seems distinctly unboyish, subverting as it does the liturgical signature of immutability ("Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum"58 ["As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end"59]) and declaring a general disbelief in utopias. A Byronic Verfremdungseffekt is also secured by the focus on composition itself, the black ink on the page counterpointing the sunshine

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it tries to evoke: "days, as I said before, / Which shall be made as fine as ink can make them." These quirks testify to the healthful, robust nature of the cynicism, which Afroditi Panaghis has read in rather too solemn a frame of mind: "Beddoes looked into his heart for the means to create a world of his own, but his tormented soul and pessimistic attitude toward life engendered a world of despair and destruction. In this world, man loses faith in a better life here and hereafter, and lives in a continuous fear of death and dissolution."60 The poem does contain fearful elements, certainly, but Beddoes qualifies them with repeated jests. We even catch a glimpse of Samuel Butler's marriage of natural and culinary events— "And, like a lobster boil'd, the morn From black to red began to turn"61— when Boreas blows "Old Etna's porridge," a moment conveying the precise texture of lava even as it aerates the tone. So far as its thematic content goes, the prologue is itself a mock sample of world-making. Beddoes tosses off his idyll with the fiats that Keats had used to touch up his account of Hampstead Heath. Compare A bush of May flowers with the bees about them; Ah, sure no tasteful nook would be without them; And let a lush laburnum oversweep them,62

with Bees we must have to hum, shrill-noted swallows With their small lightning wings to fly about And tilt against the waters:—that will do.

Just as "To His Coy Mistress" revokes its adunaton only to re-instate it with a vengeance—"Thus, though we cannot make our Sun / Stand still, yet we will make him run"63—so Beddoes has his sun at his beck and call: "We will make the sun / Rise like a gentleman at noon." Equally entertaining is the capricious drift of the apostrophes, which eventually address an imaginary climate: And now, dear climate, only think what days I'd make if you'd employ me: you should have A necklace every year of such as this; Each bead of the three hundred sixty five—

Again one hears a disconcerting echo of Herbert—"The Sundaies of mans life, / Thredded together on times string, / Make bracelets to adorn the wife / Of the eternall glorious King."64 But it's one thing to bedizen the bride of Christ, and another thing entirely to lavish jewellery on a climate

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personified. And as if speaking to the weather weren't odd enough, Beddoes also begs pardon of cat sprawled across his manuscript, getting her in at the moment of leaving her out by the device of occupatio: ("Excuse me, puss, I couldn't get you in"). The reason for the contracted first line ("'Twas in those days") becomes apparent when, at the end of the prologue, it recurs with a three-foot complement ("'twas in those days that Alfarabi lived"), turning everything that has gone before into a massive parenthesis. One is reminded of Schlegel once again: "Das schöne, poetische, idealische Naive muss zugleich Absicht und Instinkt sein" [The beautiful, poetic, ideal naive must compound both premeditation and instinct] (p. 23). Why, one might ask in conclusion, did Beddoes write "Alfarabi" (and the two cosmogonic fragments that my redating drags with it to 1826/27)? The answer lies, I suspect, in Cuvier's recently formulated theory of catastrophism. He would have learned about this from J. F. Blumenbach, whom Donner calls "the Nestor of German medical science . . . whose universal spirit, not content with specialist knowledge, held within its grasp every branch of science; even history and archaeology were called upon for confirmation and illustration in his teaching" (The Making of a Poet, p. 184). Cuvier had opened a path to evolutionary theory by denying the dogma of the plenum, for, as Adrian Desmond points out, by declaring that the mastodon and the mammoth were dissimilar to elephants, he de facto declared them to be extinct: The simplicity of the argument is misleading, for against it stood a powerful, if rarely explicitly formulated, counter-argument resting in large measure on faith. This inhibitory notion was the concept of the plenum: that is, that a bountiful God could only have populated the world with every conceivable type of organism as a sign of his omnipotence. These organisms could be arranged into an infinitely graded chain from the smallest microscopic creature to man. Extinction broke the chain by introducing gaps, a situation deemed by the pious an adverse reflection of the Creator's power. Cuvier's detailed factual evidence in support of the mammoth's extinction finally shook man's faith in the plenum and removed the first link from the chain.65

And if scientists had embraced the idea of species extinction by 1826, isn't it likely that the corollary of an ongoing "creation" would have occurred to Beddoes as its logical counterbalance? The neatness of such an assumption would lead, after all, to the steady-state theory of the cosmos a century later:

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Bondi, Gold, and Hoyle conjectured that we might live in a 'steady-state' universe, in which continuous creation of new matter and new galaxies maintained an unchanging cosmic scene despite the overall expansion. They came up with their idea in 1948, after seeing a film called The Dead of Night, whose conclusion recapitulated the opening scene. To its proponents, the steady-state theory had a deep philosophical appeal—the universe existed, from everlasting to everlasting, in a uniquely selfconsistent state.66

A similar conviction seems to underpin these poetic fragments—inspired doodles on the topic, as it were. "An earth is born" and "The world is born today," even in spite of their angels and passing references to the Genesis myth, provide accounts of a creatorless, spontaneous coming-to-birth. "Alfarabi," a satyr "play" to their masque-like solemnities, mocks the incantatory magic of "And God said" and provided, at the same time, an entertaining friendship token for the man newly arrived from Odessa.

“The New Born Star Another Version" (p. 10) This poem, a Pindaric (or rather, Pindarique) ode, deploys topoi associated with Christian nativity hymns—their excited proclamations, their visual imperatives ("behold" occurs twice) and their sense of miracles afoot. Its opening lines echo inter alia the "Mega chai paradoxon thauma" of Germanus (Englished by J. M. Neale as "A great and mighty wonder"67), T. Pestel's "Behold, the great Creator makes / Himself a house of clay"— p. 81) and Ben Jonson's "I sing the birth was born tonight"—p. 82): The world is born today! What is the world?—Behold the wonder: With a mighty thunder 'Round the sun it rolls this way;

This apparent "churchiness" continues in the versicle and response structure of the second line, recalling as it does the hypophora of Hebrew psalmody: "Who is this King of glory? The Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory." (Psalm 24.10), but Beddoes intends these reminiscences to ring hollow, having emptied the formulae of their divinity. His world figures rather as a self-made phenomenon, hurtling toward us from a point beyond the sun, and vectored by fine, dynamic verse: And its shadow falls afar Over many a star And the interstellar vale,

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Through which some aged patient globe (Whose gaunt sides no summers robe), Like a prisoner through his grate, Shivering in despair doth wait For sunbeams broken, old, and pale.

The parataxis here has the sort of inventorying force we find in "Kubla Khan" ("And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean: / And 'mid this tumult"68) and in Blake's "Piping down the valleys wild": "And I made a rural pen, / And I stained the water clear, / And I wrote the happy songs"69), but any sense of relentlessness is modified by the intermittent rhythm of the conjunctions, as though to keep the rushing planet in focus. Beddoes establishes its sublimity by giving it presence and body enough to cast a shadow on distant stars, and, at the same time, offsets its youth by means of a spent planet that floats in a "dead" zone of the universe. Lacking inner fire, the latter depends passively and inactively on the leavings of the sun: "doth wait / For sunbeams broken, old, and pale." Thus, as in "Alfarabi," we glimpse the endless cycle of death and renewal. Beddoes takes an image from Samson Agonistes—"her vacant interlunar cave"70—and reworks it into an "interstellar vale," erasing the illogical sense of sheltered occupancy in his source. Drifting aimlessly in this shadowy zone, the "gaunt"-sided, "patient globe" also owes something to the "meagre" beadsman in "The Eve of St Agnes" ("this patient, holy man"71), a similar foil for youth and vitality, while Beddoes reverses the messianic expectancy of Isaiah 9.2—"The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light"—in a tableau of hopelessness, the idea of redemptive intervention evoked and revoked at a stroke. While it's idiomatically permissible to talk about "broken lights," the planet's "sunbeams broken" seem both mechanical and defective, a catachresis of texture and language that recalls the cosmic malaise of "Alfarabi" ("lightnings crushed / And drossy bolts, melting like noonday snow"). Beddoes compares the speeding planet with speeding deer that, by an extremely swift process of evolution, now inhabit its mountains: "Bounding, like its own light deer." This is not quite a "self-inwoven simile" defined by William Empson—"when not being able to think of a comparison fast enough [Shelley] compares the thing to a vaguer or more abstract notion of itself"72—but it remains, even so, a comparison ensphered within itself, the deer, as they whiz past us, like the found jewel in A Midsummer Night's Dream (4.1.191), our own and not our own. In the manner of Pluto and Venus, the planet rotates on a tilted axis, and the poet attributes its speed to the gravitational pull of its mountains:

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Chapter One Bounding, like its own light deer, Down a hill, behold the sphere! Now a mountain, tall and wide, Hanging weighty on its side Pulls it down impetuously; Yet the little butterfly, Whom the daisy's dew doth glut, With its wings' small pages shut, Was not stirred. (pp. 10-11)

After this headlong tumble, we cut to the composure of a settled butterfly, the sudden close-up further enhanced by an immobilizing shift into the preterite. Just as the interconnectedness of the world's weather system has been evoked by the (apocryphal?) generation of a hurricane by butterfly wings, so Beddoes presents a like concordia discors one and half centuries avant la lettre. Through a steep transition from "down impetuously" (rough and irremissive) to a delicate conjuncture of wings (miniaturized into a dolls' house booklet), he shows how stillness and calm subsist at the heart of violent cosmic motion. While the dating of these fragments remains a vexed issue, it's not impossible that the "unawakened serpent river / Coiled and sleeping" and the "dreadful sea . . . curled / Behind the nations" with "death-intending wrinkles of his brow" might owe something to the libretto that James Robinson Planché wrote for Weber's Oberon: Ocean! thou mighty monster! That lies curled like a green serpent, round about the world! To musing eye thou art an aweful sight When calmly sleeping in the morning light; But when thou risest in thy wrath, As now, and fling'st they folds around some fated prow! Crushing the strong ribbed bark as if it were a reed! Then, Ocean, thou art terrible indeed.73

If the overlap amount to more than an instance of convergent evolution, we might have a terminus a quo for the poem, for the opera premiered at Covent Garden in 1826. According to Essaka Joshua, the correspondence of William John Hamilton from Göttingen reveals that "the opening of Carl Weber's new opera, Oberon, in London . . . was much talked about in Germany," and goes on to note that "Beddoes himself notes Weber's death (5 June 1826) in a letter to Procter on 18 October 1826: 'His fellow countrymen and fellow fiddlers are all well pleased with his burial, or intended, burial honours.'"74 Be that as it may, by thus focussing on the

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menace of the ocean, Beddoes puts the whole enterprise sub specie futtilitatis, for not only has the future of the new "star" been foreshadowed in the fate of the interstellar planet, but, even before the laws of thermodynamics take their inevitable course, we learn that it will be engulfed by its own ocean. This destructive climax is hinted also by the unstable landscape, for a delayed contre rejet forces us to re-read "Now forests fall" as a tumbling of trees from the mountain sides rather than their moving on the spinning planet—and not only trees, but rocks and stones as well. Hyperbaton enacts their ejection into the lakes, the fractured noun and verb sequences jostling loosely together: Burst great rocks with thunder out: Lakes, their plunged feet about, Round and smooth, and heaving ever, An unawakened serpent-river Coiled and sleeping.

Here the rocks have feet (an animizing metaphor more usually applied to mountains or hills), and the lakes flow in around them after their fall. These bodies of water are themselves prone to seismic activity ("heaving ever"), though it's also possible to give a transitive force to "heave," in which case they can be construed as sending forth the "serpent-river." The latter's coiling looks ahead to the "dreadful sea" that will inundate the world, but it also recalls the self-ingestive in-my-end-is-my beginning of the ouroboros. "Unawakened," it contains an additional hint of the apocalyptic Kraken myth. These syntactic dislocations, while certainly expressive and mimetic, might be the function of the poem's incompleteness, the brushwork so broad and coarse as to suggest a merely provisional notation. Such dashings-down obviously stand in need of a refinement, but, as so often in the case of the Beddoes fragments, that never came. At some points, indeed, we seem to be dealing less with the controlled derangements of hyperbaton than with the uncontainable discords of anacoluthon, as when an imperative breaks in irrelevantly upon a noun phrase only half connected with the preceding line: Pastures break, and stedfast land Sinks melting:—mighty ocean is at hand.— Space for eternal waves! Be strong and wide, Thou new-born star!

Just as the poet deploys the topoi of nativity hymns to spice a godless and autonomous event, so he evokes Psalm 46 without any of its comforting concessives:

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Chapter One God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. 2 Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; 3 Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof. Selah

Beddoes supplies the same cataclysmic events, but without the proffer of refuge. Poems like these, essentially works in progress, contain glimpses of the writer's creative laboratory. We can see what items, in the heat of creation, are selected for emphasis, and we can observe his habitual movement between extremes of delicacy and violence. The very absence of editing opens a window upon the processes of his imagination, for we witness the overflow before there has been any recollection in tranquillity. There is something Miltonic about Beddoes's capacity to imagine creative events in this way, and these cosmogonic fragments have very few precedents in English literature besides Paradise Lost.

CHAPTER TWO “THE IMPROVISATORE”

"The Improvisatore," the most extensive of Beddoes's early poems, represents a considerable achievement in its own right, and even, perhaps, if we factor in the age of the poet—eighteen years at the time of its composition—a remarkable one. Self-critical from the start, however, he was soon using a penknife on every copy he came across within his circle, gutting the pages and returning the husks to the shelves. These filicidal efforts have made the volume scarce, but some innocents escaped the massacre, and the improvisatore has lived on to tell his arresting tales. Lytton Strachey, sharing Beddoes's severe judgement on the work, objects to their apparent sensationalism: The boy, with his elaborate exhibitions of physical horror, was doing his best to make his readers' flesh creep. But the attempt was far too crude; and in after years, when Beddoes had become a past-master of that difficult art, he was very much ashamed of his first publication.1

It must be added, however, that the "sensationalism" often reaches us in a form so stylized, so layered with maniera, that it changes into something rich and strange. Violence is filtered by artifice, and the counterpoint of precious manner and brutal matter pushes "The Improvisatore" back in the direction of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and away from the contemporary Gothic models with which it has been aligned. Strachey's complaint about "elaborate exhibitions of physical horror"—"apodeictic Gothic," as it were—more justly applies to Lewis's Monk than to the thanatopsis in Romeo and Juliet, the "mused rhyme"2 of which comes close to drawing the sting of death: Shall I believe That unsubstantial Death is amorous, And that the lean abhorred monster keeps Thee here in dark to be his paramour? For fear of that I still will stay with thee, And never from this palace of dim night

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Chapter Two Depart again. Here, here, will I remain With worms that are thy chambermaids. O here Will I set up my everlasting rest And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars From this world-wearied flesh. (5.3.102-12)

The difference between horror and terror subsists in distance, and there is no better way of engendering distance than by pattern, for pattern flattens and frames its subject matter, disclosing the thematic purpose it's meant to serve. If the flesh "creep" in Romeo's soliloquy, it creeps with a purpose, since Shakespeare is offering a palinode for the play's otherwise heady celebration of carnal love. Romeo's flesh, formerly vivid and instinctual, ages with a preternatural speed ("world-wearied") to fit it for the charnel house. By the same token, Keats book-ends his own hymn to the flesh ("The Eve of St Agnes") with the beadsman in his crypt, who "aye unsought for slept among his ashes cold"(p. 206). Both writers thus indemnified themselves from Mauriac's indictment of Lady Chatterley's Lover: "When satiety comes, aged, ignoble, they will seek to feed elsewhere that lust too skilfully exercised not to go on dominating during decrepitude. I think of that dreadful book: The Old Age of Lady Chatterley."3 On the other hand, no such efforts to distance and frame can be detected in The Monk—a work that, with countless others from the same stable, properly deserves the kind of charge that Strachey would bring against "The Improvisatore": My slumbers were constantly interrupted by some obnoxious Insect crawling over me. Sometimes I felt the bloated Toad, hideous and pampered with the poisonous vapours of the dungeon, dragging his loathsome length along my bosom: Sometimes the quick cold Lizard rouzed me leaving his slimy track upon my face, and entangling itself in the tresses of my wild and matted hair: Often have at waking found my fingers ringed with the long worms, which bred in the corrupted flesh of my Infant. At such times I shrieked with terror and disgust, and while I shook off the reptile, trembled with all a Woman's weakness.4

There is no "historicizing" imaginative effort behind the grand guignol here; nor, looking across the Channel to Germany, can we find it subtending the horrors of Bürger's "Lenore." Both writers divorce mediaeval "Schrecklichkeit" from the contemplative purpose it was meant to serve, and present instead a perverse feast for sadists. The gloating gestures of revelation ("Ha sieh'! ha sieh'!") are symptomatic:

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Ha sieh'! ha sieh'! Im Augenblick, Huhu! ein gräßlich Wunder! Des Reiters Koller, Stück für Stück, Fiel ab wie mürber Zunder, Zum Schädel ohne Zopf und Schopf, Zum nackten Schädel ward sein Kopf; Sein Körper zum Gerippe Mit Stundenglas und Hippe.5 [Hah hah! See there! Hah hah! See there! A sudden ghastly marvel! The rider's hauberk, piece by piece, Falls off like brittle tinder. His head becomes a naked skull, A skull with neither queue nor knot; A skeleton his body, With hourglass and sickle.]

Bürger and Lewis parade their horrors in a cultural void (a rider disintegrating into a skeleton, worms encircling fingers), adducing them simply for the frisson they engender, and betraying their function as Andachtsbilder or devotional aids. The contemplation of skeletons and corpses belongs, after all, to a time when flesh was habitually mortified, a time when contemptus mundi could scarcely be separated from contemptus carnis. Indeed, the Anglican vow of baptism, a rite central to the edifice of Christian dogma, links them zeugmatically: "the vain pomp and glory of the world, with the covetous desires of the same, and the carnal desires of the flesh."6 Noisy and sadistically boisterous though the versification of "Lenore" might be, it at least boasts a measure of energy, an energy absent from the wersh language of Lewis's novel: "They painted to him the torments of the Damned in colours the most dark, terrible, and fantastic, and threatened him at the slightest fault with eternal perdition" (p. 236). This bland oratio obliqua, this précis of generalities, betrays the book's very project, its end-in-itself presentment of horror. There, too, lies the world of difference between Lewis and the young Beddoes, for the language of "The Improvisatore" proves anything but bland. Not so the style of The Castle of Otranto, which, though more decorous in content than The Monk, is equally insipid in expression. The Gothic romance began as pastiche, after all, and Walpole's founding fiction carried next to no freight of horrors. He conceived and executed it rather as an exercise in mediaeval credulity, "an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern. In the former, all was imagination and improbability; in the latter, nature is always intended to

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be, and sometimes has been, copied with success."7 Walpole's Gothic, indeed, showed a marked kinship with the rococo, and, unlike the solemnities of Pugin and Viollet-le-Duc in the following century, presented itself as something essentially light-hearted, allowing the aficionado to "make himself ridiculous in whatever way he pleases"8—or so The World regarded the mode in 1753. Ute Engel has remarked of Strawberry Hill that although the shell "was intended to imitate the evolved layout of a medieval structure," the interiors took as their models the illustrations in the few publications on medieval architecture then available. Their application was done in a purely decorative way. A Gothic tomb or rood screen could serve equally as a basis for a fireplace or bookshelves.9

To enlist antique funerary forms for the construction of fireplaces and bookshelves is, in a sense, to play "at leap-frog with the tombstones"10 as the goblins do in The Pickwick Papers, or to make Alexander "stop a beerbarrel" as he does in Hamlet 5.1.205. Even Chateaubriand, whose Génie du Christianisme "likened Gothic churches with their many carved leaves, clustered arboreal columns, cool lofty vaults, shady sanctuaries, dark aisles, secret passages and low doorways to the labyrinths of a forest,"11 seems to have sensed a prototypic rococo beneath its charged spirituality. He was certainly aware, for example, of Westminster Abbey's "capriciousness": "One day, however, it so happened that, wishing to contemplate the interior of the basilica in the twilight, I became lost in admiration of its bold, capricious architecture." 12 Walpolian Gothic—merely decorative and impulse-driven—led Constable to deplore the "vain endeavour to reanimate deceased Art, in which the utmost that can be accomplished will be to reproduce a body without a soul" for the simple reason that "Gothic architecture, sculpture, and painting belong to peculiar ages," and the "feelings that guided their inventors are unknown to us."13 But even if the pastiche re-embodiments of the Gothic lacked the primal force of those feelings, it was still possible to "build a fane / In some untrodden region of the mind"14—a fane far more imaginative and fanciful than any paraphrase by Pugin could manage in the flesh. With Coleridge, and with Keats and Beddoes after him, Gothic pastiche changed gear, the ludic spirit of Strawberry Hill silenced in the impassioned idyll of "The Eve of St Agnes," and in the macabre vignettes of "Christabel" and "The Improvisatore." No fireplaces and bookcases in Beddoes's poem, but rather the actualities of the transi, that "ghastly reminder of earthly mortality"15 which confronted the viewer with impermanence and corruption. In the

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context of such experience, crockets and ogee arches vanish as so many sugared irrelevancies. We must acknowledge, therefore, that "The Improvisatore" is echt Romantic pastiche, pastiche that, unlike its Strawberry Hill avatar, penetrates through decorative accidentals to arrive at a visionary essence. Beddoes's poem, though much less accomplished than the corresponding efforts of Coleridge and Keats, still shares their goals. For the key to significant pastiche (as opposed to a merely frivolous facsimile) is the annexation of old forms to contemporary issues. When Tchaikovsky writes a minuet or gavotte for The Sleeping Beauty, he brings the resources of nineteenth-century harmony and orchestration to his rococo enterprise and invests it with unimagined accretions of colour and piquancy. The result is recreative homage, and not a lifeless resuscitation of the kind that Constable deplored. No less an act of recreative homage underlies "The Improvisatore." Louis Cazamian has commented on the escapist element in some Romantic versions of the medieval—that yearning for an illusory cultural monism, for Arnold's "bright girdle furl'd"16 and for the iconography, literature and architecture that it contained: In the themes of antiquity or of the Middle Ages there was a very special force of suggestion; the modes of a former life were idealized by their very remoteness; they were looked upon as possessing either an incomparable wealth of beauty, or an attractive and picturesque simplicity, which one of refined taste must relish even more, because he would thus feel the supreme pleasure of obtaining partly through himself, and through his own effort, a gratification the more enjoyable for being more largely selfcreated.17

That is the Walpolian take on the matter. Beddoes on the other hand, like Coleridge and Keats before him, disinterestedly tried to recover the grotesque and morbid qualities of the mediaeval Anschauung along with the picturesque details by which it was framed. Certainly there is no taint in "The Improvisatore" of the religious idealism and nostalgia that other Romantics brought to their reconstructions of the middle ages. We will never find Beddoes, like Novalis, saluting the church's "omnipresence in life, its love for art, its profound humanity . . . its delight in poverty, obedience and loyalty"18—for, true son of his rationalist father, he despised the bigotry upon which that "omnipresence" was predicated. But what he does achieve, far more inwardly than Lewis and his school, is the spirit of the mediaeval Totentanz and the ars moriendi, the Middle Ages' sense of life as a thanatopsis. Every one of the idylls in "The

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Improvisatore" modulates at the last toward disruption, corruption and death. The originality of Beddovian pastiche subsists not only in its disinterested breadth and comprehensiveness, but also in its innovative play with form. That the story-teller figure on whom the suite centres was not unique to the middle ages is witnessed by Merimée's Columba: "Miss Nevil had heard about the Corsican improvisatrices and was dying to hear one. She therefore begged Colomba to give her a sample of her talent."19 Corsican improvisatores seem to have declaimed rather than sung, for Colomba's style, though oratorical, is measured into melodic phrases in a way that approximates the operatic device of "parlando": "'Speaking'— either literally or in style of performance."20 Beddoes possibly knew of this still-extant tradition, but, by giving his poem a mediaeval context, he also invested his entertainer with the trappings of an Anglo-Saxon scop and a Celtic bard. At the same time, the colour, maniera and variety of the verse show little kinship with "the newly-discovered Nordic mood and ideal" that Herder had hailed as "utterly natural poetry, totally lacking in artificiality." 21 Instead of reproducing the bleak, sub-Homeric heroics of Ossian, Beddoes opted for the colourful trouvères and troubadours, but without altogether dispensing with the grisliness of that "Nordic mood." The graphic violence of Gray's "Fatal Sisters"— See the grisly texture grow, ('Tis of human entrails made,) And the weights that play below, Each a gasping warrior's head.22

—figures in "The Improvisatore" at several points—"The dead are all reeking, a ghastly heap, / Slippery with gore, and with crushed bones steep"23—but it's countervailed by a lyricism that hardly seems "scaldic": The sky, which shone like one broad eye of blue, Sprinkled the velvet turf with scented dew; The prattling birds now ventured from their nests, Some spread their wings where the sweet balm was shed, (p. 16)

The young poet would have been familiar with the "Essay on Ancient Minstrels" accompanying Percy's Reliques, and the parallel it draws between the native musical tradition and that of the Norman conquerors: The honours shown to the Norman or French Minstrels, by our princes and great barons, would naturally have been imitated by their English vassals and tenants, even if no favour or distinction had ever been shown here to

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the same order of men in the Anglo-Saxon and Danish reigns. So that we cannot doubt but the English Harper and Songster would, at least in a subordinate degree, enjoy the same kind of honours, and be received with similar respect among the inferior English gentry and populace.24

Small wonder, therefore, that Beddoes's improvisatore should come to life as a compound familiar ghost. In the absence of any clues about his exact temporal location, we can imagine him as a Saxon scop, a Danish scald, a Celtic Bard, a Norman trouvère and a Provençal troubadour by turn. It's not even clear whether he practises his art in England or on the Continent; the spatial data are geographically vague, and the names in the narratives range from the English "Emily" to the French "Rodolph" to the German "Leopold." A third—"Albert"—can feature in all three tongues, depending on how you pronounce it. As far as its structural pattern goes, "The Improvisatore" owes its immediate inspiration to Scott's "Lay of the Last Minstrel," which also places its performer in an historical context, and then inserts a narrative in the first person. Scott’s figure had only one story, however, so Beddoes supplemented his source with other models, chief amongst which are the narrative suites of the Arabian Nights, the Decameron and The Canterbury Tales. Of these only Chaucer's anticipates his strategy of gathering up three metrically distinct and independent narratives by means of bridge passages, whereas those of The Arabian Nights owe their (loose) integration to the fact that they are told by a single person. Scheherazade doesn't differentiate the forms of her stories, and neither does Boccaccio the novelle of the Decameron. In The Canterbury Tales, on the other hand, Chaucer renders some tales in couplets and others in more complex stanzas—"The Monk's in a variant ottava rima (ababbcbc) and "The Prioress's" in rhyme royal. They are also all informed by different personalities, a circumstance that we need to factor into our reading, something that doesn't really enter the picture here, for the improvisatore's character, only faintly sketched in the three inductions, fails to impinge on his stories. Another structural precedent for the poem can be found in lyric poems that frame a secondary song within a primary. Some of these offer no formal differentiation between husk and kernel, as witness Marvell's "Bermudas," where the syntaktikon uses the same measure as the tetrameter couplet that announces it ("From a small Boat, that row'd along, / The listning Winds receiv'd this Song"25), and Theocritus' "Idyll I," where Thyrsis' threnody retains the hexameter measure of the narrative integument, from which it is distinguished only by its habit of invocation: "Begin the bucolic theme, kind Muses, begin!"26 Milton, by contrast,

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provides a rhyme royal proem to the ode "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity"—its "institutional" voice, so to speak—before devising a rhapsodic outline for the hymn itself: And join thy voice unto the Angel Choir, From out his secret Altar touch'd with hallow'd fire. THE HYMN It was the Winter wild, While the Heav'n-born child, All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies;27

Of these three frame poems, it goes without saying that the "Nativity Hymn" comes closest to the format of "The Improvisatore." Beddoes's design represents a balance between integration (the common speaker and an "induction" of tetrameter couplets) and variety (the three tales, each differing from the others in form and content). The first tale, "Albert and Emily," uses a variant form of ottava rima, two couplets followed by a cross-rhymed quatrain. This subverts the couplet's traditional role as a capsulator, deploying four distiches in the stanzaic space ordinarily reserved for exposition: 'Twas on a the evening of a summer day The frowning clouds were scudding fast away; The sky, which shone like one broad eye of blue, Sprinkled the velvet turf with scented dew; The prattling birds now ventured from their nests, Some spread their wings where the sweet balm was shed, Some vainly decked their variegated breasts, And some were bustling to their tiny bed. (p. 16)

No doubt the design originated in Beddoes's teeming and original mind, but it's not impossible that, in the course of his extensive reading, he had encountered a poem entitled "Of a Lover That Made His Only God of His Love": All you that frendship do professe, And of a frende present the place: Geue eare to me that did possesse, As frendly frutes as ye imbrace And to declare the circumstance, There were to them selues that did auance: To teache me truly how to take,

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A faithfull frende for vertues sake.28

If he did indeed come across this stanza pattern, he still felt the need to amplify its buoyant tetrameters into five-stress lines. "Albert and Emily," which, by way of further additional variety, includes a ballad-metre planctus ("Emily's Plaint"), is followed by a "Second Fytte" called "Rodolph the Wild." His stanza for this is stately to the point of cumbrousness—a couplet sextine and a cross-rhymed quatrain, not unlike the aberrant ottava rima in "Albert and Emily": There is a massy cloud of dismal hue, Climbing reluctantly the pathless blue; It is the pall of the departed day; And, after it, the self-same silent way, A heavy troop of mist-clad mourners wend, And down the lampless, dim, horizon bend; The grave and cradle of short-lived time, Ocean receives them with its gaping billows, And with its hoarse notes, which its death-song chime, Lulls on its breast the infant day it pillows. (p. 29)

Beddoes also intercalates other stanza forms into this story. The soi-disant "Madrigal" uses anapaests— How sweet is the voice of the beauty I love, As the violet's scent at eventide; As the first, softest, sigh of the nestling dove, As the laughter of fairies when they ride. As soft as the evening breeze, As sweet as the blackbird's song, As gentle as summer bees That flutter the garden among. (p. 30)

—and the song of the sirenical nymphs employs a different strophe altogether. The final fytte ("Leopold") allows couplets and stanzas to assemble into irregular verse paragraphs. Beddoes casts the first of these in dactyllic tetrameters, but eventually settles on the iambic pentameter more usually associated with heroic narrative. The fytte breaks off with ellipses that mimic a fragmentary manuscript, and has no formal peroration. Since the violent nature of Leopold's story doesn't admit of tidy postlude, this "dangling" solution suits it well. The first of the inductions, to which I shall now turn, is prefaced with an epigraph from Beaumont and Fletcher'sKing and No King 3.1: "She died / More innocent than sleep, / As clear as her own eyes, and

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blessedness / Eternal waits upon her where she is." Beddoes clearly means it to look ahead to "Albert and Emily" instead of to the induction in hand, and sanitize the heroine's necrophilia in the same way that Arbaces inoculates his incestuous passion for Panthea by notionally killing her. Dead, she cannot tempt him, a point clarified in the lines that follow: I know she would not make a wish to change Her state for new, and you shall see me bear My crosses like a man.29

Arbaces exonerates himself of incest by denying life to his inamorata; Emily can't properly be a necrophile because, in her madness, she fails to acknowledge her lover's death. But that is all to come. For the present, Beddoes is concerned with a landscape. Like most painters of winter vignettes, he sets up a contrast between cold externals and festive warmth, which is Shakespeare's strategy in Act 1 of Hamlet, and Spenser's in The Faerie Queene 7.7.41—"And after him, came next chill December: / Yet he through merry feasting which he made, / And great bonfires, did not the cold remember."30 Beddoes begins by tracking the texture and motion of the snow: Dank is the air and dusk the sky, The snow is falling featherily, And, as the light flakes kiss the ground, They dance in mazy circles round; Like venturous nestlings in the shower, Trying their new-fledged pinions' power. (p. 15)

By taking, as three points of reference, the conceit in Milton's ode "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity"— And on her naked shame, Pollute with sinful blame, The Saintly Veil of Maiden white to throw,31

—the Augustan objectivity of The Seasons— Thick clouds ascend, in whose capacious womb A vapoury deluge lies, to snow congealed. Heavy they roll their fleecy world along, And the sky saddens with the gathered storm. Through the hushed air the whitening shower descends, At first thin-wavering; till at last the flakes Fall broad and wide and fast, dimming the day

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With a continual flow.32

—and the post-Romantic vision of "London Snow" (Robert Bridges)— When men were all asleep the snow came flying, In large white flakes falling on the city brown, Stealthily and perpetually settling and loosely lying, Hushing the latest traffic of the drowsy town; Deadening, muffling, stifling its murmurs failing; Lazily and incessantly floating down and down: Silently sifting and veiling road, roof and railing.33

—we will be able to gauge the way Beddoes mixes fancy with fidelity to facts. Milton's statuesque conceit subordinates factual notation to design, while Thomson records his observations dispassionately and with little recourse to figurative language. The "vapoury deluge" and "fleecy world" are actual and linguistic allotropes—the one liquid, and the other congealed, though both "womb" and "fleecy" have a metaphoric charge, the latter a well-known pastoral locution ("Two Swains, whom Love kept wakeful, and the Muse, / Pour'd o'er the whitening Vale their fleecy Care"34). Bridges, for his part, banishes even this vestigial kind of metaphor, using repeated participles to focus on the effects of the snow rather than on the phenomenon itself. Beddoes differs from all three by offering us attentively rendered minutiae, and, at the same time, a certain linguistic gorgeousness. He clearly learned this secret from Keats, the source, too, of the verbal choreography that, after a gestural sweep of monosyllables ("Dank is the air and dusk the sky") resorts to a flurrying adverb, snow-like in its delicacy ("The snow is falling featherily"). One can note en passant, without, of course, hinting a possibility of influence, that a snow scene in Gautier's Émaux et camées also couples broad monosyllabic strokes with a festive syllabic flutter: Le ciel est noir, la terre est blanche; Cloches, carillonnez gaiment!35

But whereas Gautier's switch from indicative to imperative has a jarring effect, Beddoes better integrates the difference into a context of syntactic continuity. By straddling two feet, "Featherily" enforces a careful negotiation of its components, while the clumping of the syllables pulls the strong stress of "feath" away from the "ing" that belongs to its iamb, and takes it into a different metrical "drama" (trochee, iamb). This lightens the pattern, and, in tandem with the catalectic syllable of the feminine

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rhyme, creates an effect of plucking, of word particles set in motion. Like the down of the containing metaphor, it harks back to the old sailors' aetiology of snow: "Mother Carey's plucking her goose." At the same time, a chain of interconnecting images anchors the description even as Beddoes emphasizes its aleatoric drift and circling, since "featherily" links with "pinions," and "pinions" with "nestlings." Then after an "enharmonic" modulation from "nestling" to "cradle," the poet dabs an offsetting splash of scarlet: The boughs ice-sheathed shake, bristling out, And coral holly berries pout In crystal cradles, like the shine Of goblets flushed with blood-red wine: (p. 15)

Once again, the versification is astonishingly accomplished, the regular iambs of the first three feet broken by a caesura and introduces the intractable bristling of the holly branch. Its horrent spikes are further dramatized in the amphibrach protruding out at the end of the line. Goblets of anachronistic crystal hint at the warmth and festivity within the castle and heighten our sense of the cold outside, recalling Thomson's "rigours of the year, / In the wild depth of winter," which he sets against "A rural, sheltered, solitary scene; / Where ruddy fire and beaming tapers join / To cheer the gloom."36 At the same time, a strategic confusion attends the inverted adverbs that set up the vertical axis of the view: The subtle net of mist is wove, And all below, and all above Are twinkling through it,. . .

(p. 15)

Although "above and below" is the more idiomatic sequence, Beddoes's procedure is not without precedent, as witness Dryden's "all below is Strength, and all above is Grace,"37 though that lacks the instability that his successor wrings from the reversal. Unlike Thomson, he strikes no overt note of social protest when he moves to the festivities inside the castle— Ah! Little think the gay licentious proud, Whom pleasure, power, and affluence surround— They, who their thoughtless hours in giddy mirth, And wanton, often cruel, riot waste— Ah! Little think they, while they dance along, How many feel, this very moment, death And all the sad variety of pain;38

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—but he does project the menace and violence of baronial life: Rich wine, with steaming wavelet's swell, Is bubbling in its silver well, And from the hearths warm streamlets flow Of cheerful heat and flickering glow; With murmur loud the rebel fire Is spitting forth its flameful ire, Licking with curled fang the bar, And reeking in the strife of war, And waving through the smoke-dimmed air Its blazing banner of red glare. (pp. 15-16)

The flames have a "ire" not dissimilar, perhaps, to that felt by the excluded serfs, or to that of the barons whose endless contestations destabilized the social order of the middle ages. To that extent the "smoke-dimmed air" of the banqueting hall hints at the "smoke-dimmed air" of battle.39 The serflike fire, imprisoned in andirons but testing them for escape, contains an catachresis that marries a rigid fang with a lax, exploratory tongue, creating an unease both syntactic and lexical. An analogue for this brief but disturbing moment occurs in a sketch by Dickens: The ground at my feet where, when last there, I had seen the peasantry of Naples dancing among the vines, reckless of the burning mountain which threatened to overwhelm them, was now in possession of a strong serpent of engine-hose, watchfully lying in wait for the serpent Fire, and ready to fly at it if it showed its forked tongue.40

Beddoes couldn't have known Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (published only in 1839), but the feast in that poem shows how admirably he has caught the tone and spirit of the real thing: Þen þe first cors come with crakkyng of trumpes, Wyth mony baner ful bry3t þat þerbi henged; Nwe nakryn noyse with þe noble pipes, Wylde werbles and wy3t wakned lote, Þat mony hert ful hi3e hef at her towches. Dayntés dryuen þerwyth of ful dere metes, Foysoun of þe fresche, and on so fele disches Þat pine to fynde þe place þe peple biforne For to sette þe sylueren þat sere sewes halden on clothe. Iche lede as he loued hymselue Þer laght withouten loþe;

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Chapter Two Ay two had disches twelue, Good ber and bry3t wyn boþe.41 Then the first course came in with such cracking of trumpets, (Whence bright bedecked blazons in banners hung) Such a din of drumming and a deal of fine piping, Such wild warbles whelming in whirlpools of sound, That hearts were uplifted high at the strains. Then delicacies and dainties were delivered to the guests, Fresh food in foison, such freight of full dishes That space was scarce at the social tables When the broth was brought in in bowls of silver To the cloth Each feaster made free with the fare, Took lightly and nothing loth; Twelve plates were for every pair, Good beer and bright wine both.42

With the scene thus set, a knight commissions a performance from the minstrel, his brief ars poetica proving that Beddoes had embraced the affective theory underpinning the "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads"—"I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity"43—and also Shelley's aesthetic idealism—"Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds, . . . the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own"44: 'Now for tale,' exclaimed the Knight, 'Breathing the love of ladies bright, 'And virtues high and sorrow deep, 'Till music's self shall seem to weep: 'Call forth that wandering minstrel boy, 'That with his lyre-string loves to toy.' The youth was brought, and low he bowed Modestly to the noble crowd. 'Strike,' quoth the Knight, 'some simple tune, 'Like blackbird's song in leafy June; 'And veil the words you chaunt aloud 'Of love, or war, in music's cloud.' (p.16)

The knight insists on a "breathing" verisimilitude that brings Keats's urn to mind ("All breathing human passion far above"45), while the abstractions of form ("music's cloud") blur the antonyms of peace and conflict ("Of love, or war") just as the urn breaks down the antithesis of the human and divine: "What men or gods are these?" (p. 209).

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Nor should we overlook the affinity between the "blackbird's song in leafy June" and Keats's nightingale "among the leaves" (p. 207). The "veil of music" puts its affective power to mimetic use, and, through a selfreflexive personification, itself succumbs to a "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings"—"Till music's self shall seem to weep"—to recall Collins's "Song from Shakespeare's Cymbeline": Each lonely scene shall thee restore, For thee the tear be duly shed: Beloved, till life could charm no more, And mourned, till Pity's self be dead.46

Beddoes’s prosopopoeia turns in upon itself like the self-inwoven similes identified by William Empson—"when not being able to think of a comparison fast enough [Shelley] compares the thing to a vaguer or more abstract notion of itself"47—though in this case it's less a question of something "abstract" than of something more concentrated: we penetrate the personification to arrive at its core. When the tale gets underway, Beddoes all but forgets about the mediaeval induction, and skips ahead to the world of the Elizabethan epyllion, a form that sacrifices narrative momentum to rich, leisured descriptiveness. Following their example, he turns an essentially slight story into a sequence of glowing ecphrases. Peter Ure finds a moral purpose behind this impulse in Daniel's Complaint of Rosamond— Even the mythological tales, engraved on a casket which the king gives to Rosamond, quite disobey any canons of plausibility in character and are chosen and described, in a lively and glittering set-piece (372-413), because they reinforce the moral significance of the narrative; what royal philanderer would wish to remind his victim of Neptune's rapes or Jove's fantastic jealousy?48

—but one could argue that such "lively and glittering set-pieces" often constitute their own lively and glittering rewards, and that their "moral significance" is so much tendentious afterthought. Elizabethan verse epics, after all, had broken with the tradition of Ovide moralisé which breathed its last in Arthur Golding's introduction to the Metamorphoses. As M. Reese points out, Golding was aware of the multiple significances the poem might contain, and he was entitled to draw from it such instruction as might be sustaining to an upright and religious man. But this was the dying voice of the Middle Ages, and no one would write of Ovid in quite that way again.49

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In "Scylla's Metamorphosis," all the impositions of the Bersuire's Ovidius Moralizatus have vanished: Through the drench of tears—and no one would deny that Glaucus complains overmuch—the outlines are firm. Here is an erotic story told against a mythological background, but it does not pretend to any 'dark' significance. It has a point, as myths should have, and this only says that girls should relent to lovers who prove their constancy. (p. 5)

The reason for Glaucus' extended complaint isn't hard sought: it affords Lodge a platform for the virtuosity that is the poem's raison d'être: Alas, woe's me, how oft have I bewept So fair, so young, so lovely, and so kind; And whilst the god upon my bosom slept, Beheld the scars of his afflicted mind, Imprinted in his ivory brow by care That fruitless fancy left unto his share. My wand'ring lines, bewitch not so my senses; But, gentle Muse, direct their course aright; Delays in tragic tales procure offences: Yield me such feeling words that whilst I write My working lines may fill mine eyes with languish, And they to note my moans may melt with anguish. (pp. 74-75)

The phrase "Delays in tragic tales" aptly describes the stop and start of epyllion narrative, frequently inlaid with panels of ornamental writing. This decoration often has a paradoxical quality, for while the Elizabethans valued verisimilitude, they also favoured a highly wrought and selfconscious texture, two appetites that necessarily pulled against each other. Hence, for example, Spenser's bizarre ivy in the Bower of Bliss (The Faerie Queene, II.12.61), X-rayed to assure us of its costly artifice, but which, even so, deceives the eye with a trompe l'oeil worthy of Zeuxis: And ouer all, of purest gold was spred A trayle of yuvie in his natiue hew; For the rich mettall was so coloured That wight who did not well-auis'd it view Would surely deeme it to be yuie trew.50

This curious compound of the artificial and the real distinguishes epyllion imagery from the franker delight in artifice per se that we find in mediaeval art. The Byzantine birds so enviously hymned by Yeats were, above all things, golden artefacts. No attempt there to pass them off as

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occupants of an aviary: "the so-called throne of Solomon . . . was surrounded by golden lions and golden birds on a golden tree . . . the throne was elevated, the lions seemed to roar and the birds to sing."51 Romanticism, however, changed such attitudes at a stroke. Hood mocks the ostentatiousness of gold throughout "Miss Kilmansegg and Her Precious Leg," and Keats and Beddoes provide a wholly different take on costly metals and jewels. The pastiche epyllia of Romanticism subtract the golden substrate that Spenser had carefully certified beneath the green enamel. Unlike him, they embrace the vegetative actuality as something worthy in and of itself. While their similes sometimes rely on artificial vehicles, the artifice is always absorbed by the natural phenomenon to hand. In "I Stood Tip-Toe," Keats invokes tiaras to describe the dew of Hampstead—"Had not yet lost those starry diadems / Caught from the early sobbing of the morn" (p. 3)—but leaves us with a sense of moisture rather than hard mineral surfaces, just as Beddoes equates velvet with his turf, and then waters it in way would obviously ruin the very fabric that his conceit invokes: 'Twas on the evening of a summer day The frowning clouds were scudding fast away; The sky, which shone like one broad eye of blue, Sprinkled the velvet turf with scented dew; The prattling birds now ventured from their nests, Some spread their wings where the sweet balm was shed, Some vainly decked their variegated breasts, And some were bustling to their tiny bed. (p. 16)

This tableau looks back to the thanksgiving in Beethoven's "Pastoral" Symphony and ahead to the sense of well-being, pat and complacent, of Pippa Passes: The hill-side's dew-pearled; The lark's on the wing; The snail's on the thorn: God's in his heaven— All's right with the world.52

The same atmosphere extends into the second stanza, with its dewy quietude and still, pendulous flowers. This once again catches the tone of "I Stood Tip-Toe," Keats having noted how The air was cooling, and so very still, That the sweet buds which with a modest pride, Pull droopingly, in slanting curve aside, (p. 4)

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Beddoes reworks that observation in his own terms: The flowrets downward cast their tearful eyes, And seemed to sleep, so silently they hung; Save where the harebells waved in zephyr's sighs; To elfin ears, no doubt, a peal they rung. (p. 17)

The stasis and oddly audible silence also remind one of "the very sigh that silence heaves" (p. 3) in "I Stood Tip-Toe." Beddoes's half-discerned "elfin" resonance has an additional interest in the context of later "fairy writing"—to use the term Addison's term for fancies that, lacking a classical precedent, force a poet to "work altogether out of his own invention."53 In "Oberon's Feast," Herrick had had insects serenade the fairy king ("The merry Cricket, puling Flie, / The piping Gnat for minstralcy"54), no doubt inspiring Hood's goblin, six years after "The Improvisatore," to "utter forth a shrill small shriek" by blowing on the "ruddy skin from a sweet rose's cheek."55 An even closer approximation to bells for elfin ears occurs in music rather than literature, since Mendelssohn's Piano Fantasy in E Minor, Op 16, composed two years after Hood's "Plea of the Midsummer Fairies," represents a "vine with trumpetlike flowers" by "fanfares and light detached chords."56 Beddoes's Bristolian background might have shaped the conceit, for, according to Geoffrey Grigson, the harebell (Campanula rotundifolia) "was a fairy plant in the south-west of England, however much it has now been airyfairy'd."57 If "airyfairying" mean "miniaturizing" or "rendering delicate," then Beddoes stands accused, for he reactivates the same image that Shakespeare had floated in The Tempest 5.1.89—"In a cowslip's bell I lie"—making it over as a carillon of "no tone." Clearly he had learned the lesson of the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" in this regard: "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter" (p. 209). The tale then presents us with a miniaturized and secular version of the "Multifoliate rose,"58 proceeding through layer upon layer of secrecy to arrive at the lovers themselves. The valley is bisected by a stream in which "there was a little isle" (p. 17), itself bearing a "flower-crowned mount" that has within it a further "sparkling fount." Here one senses a debt to Keats's "Sleep and Poetry"—"What is more tranquil than a muskrose blowing / In a green island, far from all men's knowing" (Keats, p. 42)—and the "Imitation of Spenser"—"It seem'd an emerald in the silver sheen / Of the bright waters" (Keats, p. 21), not to mention John of Gaunt's hymn to England in Richard II: "This precious stone set in the silver sea"(2.1.45-50). Beddoes's adaptation—"'Twas like a gem in living silver set"—mentions "quicksilver," but immediately skirts the lethal

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implications of mercury to dwell instead on the sheen of living water. Several metaphors in "The Improvisatore" blend ideas of liquidity with the brilliance of gemstones or precious metals, and probably derive once again from the Elizabethan verse romance. One thinks in this regard of the "crystal tide" and "silver rain" in "Venus and Adonis": Here overcome, as one full of despair, She vail'd her eyelids, who like sluices stopp'd The crystal tide that from her two cheeks fair In the sweet channel of her bosom dropp'd; But through the flood-gates breaks the silver rain, And with his strong course opens them again.59

"Crystal tide" and "silver rain" represent the same kind of imaginative effort as "cloud-wept ruby" and "tears of emerald" (p. 17), which, by offering close-ups of each "gem's" contour, focus the interface between the liquid and the colours it refracts. Beddoes takes pains to blend what Marvell had preferred to separate: And its little Globes Extent, Frames as it can its native Element. How it the purple flow'r does slight, Scarce touching where it lyes,60

Even in spite of the imaginative liquefaction and softening of the rubies and emeralds, the general tenor of this passage recalls the Elizabethan delight in artifice witnessed by the pigment metaphor in Love's Labour's Lost: "And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue / Do paint the meadows with delight"—5.2.888-89). The sixteenth century’s general striving to turn the quotidian world into something "rich and strange" (The Tempest 1.2.404) leads it to alchemize a leaden reality and "deliver a golden"61 in its stead. Hence our sense of passing, in "Albert and Emily," through a set of bejewelled screens, which the poet slides open one by one until the lovers come into view. Keats's "Ode to Psyche" provided a template of sorts— I saw two fair creatures, couched side by side In deepest grass, beneath the whisp'ring roof Of leaves and trembled blossoms, where there ran A brooklet scarce espied. Mid hush'd, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed, Blue, silver-white and budded Tyrian, They lay calm-breathing on the bedded grass; (p. 211)

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—for Beddoes sets up his sanctum sanctorum in much the same way, disclosing his figures as a priest might unveil a monstrance: There too were lilies, like a lady's cheek Moistened with a lover's kisses, and there the sleek And glittering turf was daisy-chequered o'er, A beauteous carpet on the arbour's floor. And there they lay, ALBERT and EMILY, As fair a pair of buds as e'er were seen, (p. 17)

The flowers surrounding Cupid and Psyche, time-honoured emblems of transience and mortality, indicate that they too will suffer the fate of "Olympus' faded hierarchy" (p. 211). But Beddoes goes even further than Keats at this point, and blends Albert and Emily into the actual flora ("As fair a pair of buds as e'er were seen") that surrounds them as Milton had blent Proserpine into her setting in Paradise Lost: . . . Not that fair field Of Enna, where Prosperin gath'ring flow'rs, Herself a fairer Flow'r by gloomy Dis Was gather'd, . . .62

But there is also a tough Metaphysical thread winding through the Elizabethan luxuriance. While violets conventionally feature in pastoral landscapes—Milton's Comus has a "violet-embroider'd vale" (p. 95)—a single sensuous bloom also appears in Donne's "Ecstasy," letting a shaft of rich colour into an otherwise unsensuous and crabbed metaphysical exercise: Where, like a pillow on a bed, A pregnant bank swelled up, to rest The violet's reclining head, Sat we two, one another's best;63

Mutatis mutandis, Beddoes does something similar when he inserts a conceit that might have sprung from "The Good Morrow" ("My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears"—p. 60): Her eyes were but half open, yet out peeped Two starry balls in watery radiance steeped Between the fringed lids, striving to hide Their softness from the lover at her side: And when he dared to look into those bright And streaming crystals, with a timid stare,

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He saw a smiling babe, swathed in light, As if the god of love were cradled there. (p. 17)

He overlays it at the same time with the richer, more decorative texture of the Elizabethan conceit, for his image also owes something to "Venus and Adonis": Lord, how her lips do dwell upon his cheeks; And how she looks for babies in his eyes: And how she sighs, and swears she loves and leeks, (p. 82)

Whereas the mathematical chiasmus of "The Good Morrow" criss-crosses and equates the lovers' twin identities in their gaze, Albert doesn't see his own eidolon in the eyes before him, but rather an image of the baby Eros. Beddoes's narrative also shares the hyper-refinement of experience that we find in Shakespeare's epyllion, for just as each component of Venus' sorrow serves as a peg for a decorative arabesque— O how her eyes and tears did lend and borrow! Her eye seen in the tears, tears in her eye: Both crystals where they view'd each other's sorrow, Sorrow that friendly sighs sought still to dry; But like a stormy day, now wind, now rain, Sighs dry her cheeks, tears make them wet again.

(p. 53)

—so, as Emily's eyes open in erotic slow motion, the poet lovingly prolongs the experience. Decorativeness subsists in the impress of pattern, and pattern necessarily abstracts itself from individuated form. Both factors shape the ecphrasis to hand. Stylizing eyes as balls, Beddoes offers homage to Milton ("So thick a drop serene hath quencht thir Orbs"— Paradise Lost, p. 258) and also salutes the pictorial amplitude of Elizabethan verse, for even the bleakest tragedies of Shakespeare contain jewelled passages: . . . those happy smilets That play'd on her ripe lips seem'd not to know What guests were in her eyes; which parted thence, As pearls from diamonds dropp'd. (King Lear 4.3.20-22)

Emily's "streaming crystals" derive from moments such as these, their "watery radiance" explained by the Latin metonym "lumina"="eyes," which Beddoes would have known both at source and in Measure for

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Measure ("And those eyes, the break of day / lights that do mislead the morn"—4.1.3-4). The erotic teleology imposed on Emily's features—"Her mouth seemed formed for sighs and sportive guile"—parallels the "providential" purposes of love that we find in The Two Gentlemen of Verona—"The heaven such grace did lend her, / That she might admired be" (4.2.41-42)—and in Byron's "So, We'll Go No More,": "Though the night was made for loving."64 Beddoes both moderates and heightens the sensual charge implicit in his conceit by introducing a note of intermittence (her smile "like an inconstant moth / Around a flower—p. 18), which note also sounds in Marlowe's "Hero and Leander": Thus near the bed she blushing stood upright, And from her countenance behold ye might A kind of twilight break, which through her hair, As from an orient cloud, glims here and there.65

This leads to a systematic descent of the gaze such as we find in Donne's "To His Mistress Going to Bed," starting at the girdle and ending at the shoes. Beddoes implies the nakedness of Emily's bosom by referring to its flushes, but ensures its virginality by enthroning "pure love" within it. This marks yet another stage in the poem's penetration to the heart of things, for not only do the lovers occupy a sanctum sanctorum in the landscape but their very hearts figure as sacred spaces within a sacred space, like the infinite regress of the Royal Baking Powder tin. By referring to the "sovereign seat" of "pure love," Beddoes naturally recalls the shrine within a shrine in Keats's "Ode on Melancholy": "Ay, in the very temple of delight / Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine" (p. 220). At the same time, even though he has taken over the Petrarchan maniera of Elizabethan verse, he follows Keats in disregarding its ostentatious chastity, and celebrates extra-marital sex with the same frankness that we find in "The Eve of St Agnes": "All ignorant of cold disdain or smart, / Responsive to her lover's sighs it beat" (p. 18). The latter couplet hinges on the dual meaning of "responsive," evoking emotional reciprocity on the one hand, and musical antiphons on the other ("The Attic warbler pours her throat, / Responsive to the cuckoo's note"—Gray, p. 49.) The craft of "Albert and Emily" founders to some extent on the Clevelandism that follows—that species of conceit that buckles for want of a secure bridge between tenor and vehicle. Cleveland's most notorious effort—"I am no Poet here; my pen's the spout / Where the raine-water of mine eyes run out"66—fails because it can't engineer a plausible passage of liquid from eye to quill, nor a plausible conversion of tears into ink. In

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instances such as these, the impossibility troubles the mind, and the attendant frigidity leaves the emotions untouched. Beddoes's predilection for conceits can be traced to his early acquaintance with the decadent Metaphysicals, for when Procter objected to their prevalence in the first draft of Death's Jest-book, he admitted to being "a little partial [to the trope], for Cowley was the first poetical writer whom I learned to understand."67 Not infrequently his extravagances meet with success, but on other occasions, such as this, they falter: Her music-winged voice, from her sweet throat, Came winding to the ear, like a small boat Of sounds melodious, buoyed upon a lake Of flowing harmony; and, when she spake, Echo scarce sighed again, or breathed a sound As soft as zephyrs buzzing in a tree; Or, as in noontide stillness float around The honey-smothered murmurs of a bee. (p. 18)

A "music-winged voice" (whatever that might be—it unravels on inspection) should at least pass swiftly through the air like a bird or a fletched arrow, but "winding" serves to give it a "mazy motion."68 Moreover, the association of "wind" with a hunting horn—one thinks of Collins's "Ode to Evening," where "the beetle winds / His small but sullen horn" (p. 464)—introduces an altogether inappropriate timbre. But there is worse to come. We can't always ask cogent and sustained visualization of a conceit (Helen Gardner has compared it to "a spark made by striking two stones together"69), but we do need a point of contact for that generative friction to occur. Here the tenor and vehicle pass each other without so much as grazing. Music wings the voice, but the voice itself is a boat of music, and owes its winding not to the current of a river but to an improbably "flowing" lake. Moments such as these bear out H. W. Donner's claim that Beddoes's "inclination was to overlabour rather than restrain and overstate a case rather than leave it to speak for itself."70 It makes him a baroque poet by default, for "his poems form themselves into strings of ornaments where each detail is wrought for its own sake instead of giving relief to the whole" (p. 127). However, Donner also points out that the poet's "feeling for nature"71 often anchors his ornamental impulses. We see this when he reverses the traditional assignment of buzzing to bees and murmurs to breezes— . . . and when she spake, Echo scarce sighed again, or breathed a sound

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Chapter Two As soft as zephyrs buzzing in a tree; Or, as in noontide stillness float around The honey-smothered murmurs of a bee. (p. 18)

—to render that hazy, hypnagogic dissolution of sense boundaries explored in Keats's "Ode on Indolence": . . . Ripe was the drowsy hour; The blissful cloud of summer-indolence Benumb'd my eyes; my pulse grew less and less (p. 355)

Zephyrs, indistinguishable from bees, haunt the branches above; bees, murmuring like zephyrs, gather pollen below—even though the strange prolepsis of "honey-smothered" drowns them in their own sweetness. The poet has momentarily forgotten that clogged wings can't vibrate. Beddoes senses at that he must kick the narrative into action after this long descriptive stall. Inclusio seals off the ecphrasis, and "'Twas on the evening of a summer day" duplicates the first line of the fytte. While the description has slowed the passage of time, the sudden acceleration reduces it to an instant sub specie aeternitatis ("A joyous moment in a youthful life") before another rallentando ushers in the Romantic world of the nocturne. This point of the poem owes something to the ars moriendi, for it presents sleep as a rehearsal for death: Meantime the sun was fading fast away, Stealing his glory from the closing day; The breeze low murmured with its downy breath, And fanned the songsters into nightly death. The glare of light was mellowed into shade, And myriad-eyed night, the queen of thought, The silent mandate of old time obeyed, And blotted nature's beauties into nought.

Just as in Herbert's "Mortification," boys "step into their voluntarie graves,"72 so here birds "die" with the coming of darkness. "Fading" involves more than a loss of photons, and recalls the gradual depletion of consciousness in the "Ode to a Nightingale" ("And with thee fade away into the forest dim"—Keats, p. 207), while "closing day" repeats the conceit at the start of the "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard": "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day" (Gray, p. 117). What is more, Beddoes has drawn on a Sidney sonnet, presenting night as the restorative "queen of thought," and to that extent the "baiting place of wit"73;while "Myriad-eyed" recalls the peacock of the Metamorphoses: "Excipit hos

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volucris suae Saturnia pennis / collocat et gemmis caudam stellantibus inplet" [Saturnia took these eyes and set them on the feathers of her bird, filling his tail with starlike jewels],74 and counterpoints restfulness with vigilance. The Augustan night piece also plays a role, for by blotting "nature's beauties," darkness permits the undistracted reflection celebrated in Young's Night Thoughts: 'T is as the general pulse Of life stood still, and Nature made a pause; An awful pause! prophetic of her end.75

Having lavished attention on this nocturne, Beddoes then relegates his narrative task to a perfunctory capsule of brackets: (For they were plighted; and the sunset ray That kissed her bosom, the next day Would light them to the changing of their troth So long desired and waited for by both.)

Again and again his lyric impulse triumphs over his narrative mandate (as later it would skew the plotting and pace of his drama). A contemporary critic, George Wightwick, spoke of his "supersubtle genius" and "poetic luxuriance,"76 qualities that impede the narrative flow. Romantic aesthetics accorded special value to improvisation, not least because it conceived the poet's mind as an Aeolian harp, responding without premeditation to the "intellectual breeze" that played on "animated nature."77 Beethoven, for one, enjoyed a reputation as "a mighty extemporizer,"78 and so did Chopin: "there is a description in one of his letters of a musical evening at the house of Malfatti (the emperor's physician), where moonlight, fountains and flowers united for brief hour to form a rare and ideal background for the young exile's poetical improvisations."79 And even when he played his written music, Chopin gave the appearance of surrendering to the whim of the moment: "we have never heard music which has so much the air of unpremeditated effusion. The performer seems to abandon himself to the impulses of his fancy and feeling, to indulge in a reverie and to pour out unconsciously, as it were, the thoughts and emotions that pass through his mind" (p. 107). It's to this dominant cultural trend that we must trace the divagations and dilatoriness of "The Improvisatore," its narrative a thin fuse connecting bursts of pyrotechnic colour. That Beddoes suffered the same kind of structural distraction when writing plays is attested by Thomas Kelsall:

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Chapter Two . . . more than once has he taken home with him at night some unfinished act of a drama, in which the editor had found much to admire, and, at the next meeting, has produced a new one, similar in design, but filled with other thoughts and fancies, which his teeming imagination had projected, in its sheer abundance, and not from any feeling, right or fastidious, of unworthiness in its predecessor.80

H. W. Donner argues that his "talent consisted neither in the construction of plot or the drawing of character, nor in the consistent depicting of a situation or the logical development of an emotional theme; what gives his poetry both intensity and charm are the flashes of genius that illuminate almost everything he wrote" (p. 48). These colourful ex tempore "flashes" derive from an essential impulsiveness, catching sensations as they fly simply for the sake of their capture. Endymion likewise owes both its richness and weakness to the perpetual dissolution of substance into accident, of the poet's chameleonic blending into materials he has to hand: What shocks the virtuous philosop[h]er, delights the camelion Poet. It does not harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation. A poet is the most unpoetical thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body . . .81

Because a chameleon makes no conscious decision to change colour, such moments represent the triumph of instinct over mentality. It would seem that Tennyson saw the same rampancy of impulse in Beddoes, the apparent subject, according Donner,82 of this stanza from In Memoriam: This round of green, this orb of flame, Fantastic beauty; such as lurks In some wild poet when he works Without a conscience or an aim.83

Composition without conscience, narratives unreined and capricious— these announce the death of the literary watchmaker. William Paley had founded his theology on design—"there must have existed at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer"84—but if nature be as aimless and conscienceless as In Memoriam fears, then Beddoes's shapeless projects become a fitting vector for the death-of-god topos. The unremarkable plots of "The Improvisatore" function simply as armatures, set up to support endless exfoliations of texture. This fault (and the incidental vividness that is its corresponding virtue) remained with

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Beddoes throughout his career. Even Death's Jest-book led a life of its own: "My cursed fellows in the jestbook would palaver immeasurably & I could not prevent them."85 Stanza XV of "The Improvisatore" illustrates both the hand-to-mouth nature of the poet's method and, at the same time, the circumscription of his image repertoire (the obverse of its intensity): Quickly the moon, in virgin lustre dight, Amongst the brilliant swarm cast forth her light, Sailing along the waveless lake of blue, Smiling with pallid light, a bright canoe. The earth beneath, the silent-moving globe, The restless sea, the hills, the fertile ground Were all enveloped in a slender robe Of splendour, which she nightly weaves around.

The poet’s imagination centres mesmerically on a narrow range of motifs—his "lake of blue" of a piece with "eyes . . . of a beauteous melting blue, / Like a dark violet"; "The sky, which shone like one broad eye of blue"; and the "violet blue, / The couch of perfume, in dark beauty grew." No matter what the time of day, whether the tones be shadowed or sunny, blue is the unifying "tinta" (in the musicological sense of a predominant orchestral colour). However, that vivid intensity coexists with a vagueness that requires the same indulgence sometimes accorded to Shelley's imagemaking. Beddoes modulates steeply from "virgin lustre dight" to "brilliant swarm" to "Sailing along" to "Smiling" and thence to "bright canoe." The swarm metaphor seems especially disconnected, since it is accommodated neither by the garment nor the boat vehicle. However, the disjuncture becomes a fortuitous felix culpa, presenting the moon as an alien presence within a community, and so recalling Shelley's moon that wanders "companionless / Among the stars that have a different birth."86 The canoe also creates a momentary jar before we adjust it to the moon in its crescent phase, a phase that does indeed invest it with keel and prow. But a new problem arises when Beddoes reconceives it in rounded terms—"an hideous bloodshot eye" (p. 21). Shelley has exerted considerable influence on "The Improvisatore." The proem to Part IV of "Queen Mab"— 'How beautiful the night! The balmiest sigh, Which vernal zephyrs breathe in the evening's ear, Were discord to the speaking quietude That wraps this moveless scene. Heaven's ebon vault, Studded with stars unutterably bright,

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Chapter Two Through which the moon's unclouded grandeur rolls, Seems like a canopy which love had spread To curtain her sleeping world. Yon gentle hills, Robed in a garment of untrodden snow; Yon darksome rocks, whose icicles depend, So stainless, that their white and glittering spires Tinge not the moon's pure beam; . . .['] (pp. 818-19)

—has been disintegrated and reassembled in the "slender robe / Of splendour" (reworking a "garment of untrodden snow"). Beddoes's "slender" hovers piquantly between the form of the creature it clothes and the tenuity of its substance. The characteristically "orbital" perspectives of Shelley (exemplified in "her sleeping world") also prompts the extraterrestrial view in "The earth beneath, the silent-moving globe." Once again remembering the burden of his narrative, Beddoes resorts to praecisio, the trope that, in Scaliger's words, "leads to brevity"87— though it also conveniently masks the adolescent poet's limited experience of sex. Having asked "what thought-dipped pen shall chain in words / Those sweet endearments" (p. 20), he abdicates the task altogether: "My young and feeble hand / Drops from its nerveless grasp the poet's wand. / Then let your feelings tell them all in thought." One recalls similar points in "Sleep and Poetry," where we are invited to fill a gap that the poet has pointedly left open—"Therefore no insult will I give his spirit, / By telling what he sees from native merit" (p. 45)—and in Endymion: . . . Who, who can write Of these first minutes. The unchariest muse To embracements warm as theirs makes coy excuse. (p. 93)

Here another trope comes into play—the diminutio by which the speaker apologizes for his limitations in the Prologue to "The Franklin's Tale" ("Have me excused of my rude speche"88). Rhetors recommend this "as a way of capturing one's audience's sympathy,"89 but we are just as likely to be irritated by its disingenuous ducking of the task in hand. Beddoes, as we have seen, excels at description and lyric enlargement, but often stumbles when it comes to projecting character. Blunden remarks the plays' "inability to record conversation,"90 and how a dialogue in one of his letter, reveals a "plainness, and artfulness, and quickness . . . the antipodes of the lugubrious and long speeches in Death's Jest Book—. . . prodigious passages which recall a description of Coleridge's conversation—'monopollylogues'" (p. 295). Beddoes’s lyric ecphrases are well turned, for the beautiful falls easily within the compass of his powers. Not so the sublime, as witness his

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subsequent attempt at projecting a thunderstorm. When his early poetry turns grand it often turns fustian. Here, for example, is his youthful take on Laocoön: With lava reeking from their hideous jaws, Their fork'd tongues sweltering with envenomed gore Their scaly throats big with the deafening roar O'er thee they [ ] thou fair, though murdered youth, Whose form was beauty and whose soul was truth.91

The verse is crippled by a sense of strain and congestion. Febrile participial adjectives, try though they might to prolong the horror, flail about without control, and evoke the poet's own lexical impotence more than the helplessness of victims. Beddoes has neither pondered nor integrated the lava metaphor, which tries to attach itself to vomit on the one hand and to blood on the other, nor is it clear whether the gore have a human or reptilic source. One could lodge similar objections against the storm scene in "Albert and Emily": The clouds anew with fury 'gan to swell, Till from their depths sprung forth an hideous yell Darting along the wind, stunning the earth, And echoing horribly with fiendish mirth. The parting clouds that hovered in the heaven, Wild cataracts of tempest downward threw, The veil of darkness in the midst was riven, And the swift blast with wings of lightning flew. (pp. 22-23)

Just as the Laocoön fragment's relentless participles sound like impotent shouting, so here the conflicted idiom indicates a lack of control. Because Beddoes marries "darting," a visual effect of élancé, with "yell" (sonic and sustained), one scarcely knows how to construe the phrase. A thunderclap? The howling wind? Neither the timbre of the first nor the duration of the second seems to fit. The "peculiar duality" that Eleanor Wilner detects in Beddoes—"precious decorative sentimentality and his compressed, instinctive and energetic voice"92—should actually be supplemented by a tertium quid, viz., the uncontrolled synthesis (or rather a muddling) of both elements in turn. The finale of the tale has altogether greater interest insofar as it anticipates a topos that would dominate the ballet and opera of the primo ottocento—the gentle mad scene. Nina ou la Folle par amour was mounted at the King's Theatre several months after the appearance of The Improvisatore, but Beddoes might have read about Milon's ballet which

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had premiered at the Académie royale de musique in 1813. While he certainly had Ophelia's mad scene to draw upon, this Regency account of Nina's derangement seems to look ahead to Emily's: The madness of Nina is not the phrenzied excitement of ungovernable despair, but the melancholy estrangement of a mind retaining, in its ruin, the sweetness and benevolence of its unshaken state.93

Beddoes strikes the same muted, unmelodramatic note: She cast some fading blossoms on the spot, And muttered words which ears received not; Her eyes were fixed upon the empty air, And at some well-known face appeared to stare. But recollection struck her, and she threw A woeful glance upon the awe-struck group, And with a noiseless footstep flew Into the woods, with a discordant whoop. (p. 25)

Unfortunately, however, the poetry of the heroine's planctus falls short, spoiled by the lilt of its unusual amphimacric dimeter—"Oh! why art thou gone, love? / Oh why art thou gone?" (p. 26)—the bathos of which is worsened by its flat diction. On the other hand, the tale's coda comes close to recapturing the vividness and poise of its start. Beddoes once again embodies a literary shape of things to come: They laid her underneath that self-same grass, In her dead Albert's bosom; they who pass, In summer evenings, hear unearthly sighs, Dazzled by glimpses of concealed eyes. A thornless rose and lily mark the grave, That grew spontaneous from the buried pair, And ever, while in zephyr's sighs they wave, A downy perfume whispers in the air. (p. 27)

To find the same recession of Sturm und Drang into the calm of a summer evening, we must look ahead to the peroration in Wuthering Heights: I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for sleepers in that quiet earth.94

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Even so, Beddoes’s take is the more mannered of the two, Brontë settling for notations of the natural world, he for emblematic details. The "thornless rose" derives from the "rosa mystica sine spina"—an honorific phrase associated with the BVM—but it sits uneasily with the tale's celebration of carnal love, while "downy perfume" also suffers from excessive compression. It's the last of several similar utterances—"The breeze low murmured with its downy breath" (p. 19); "Not a breeze passed o'er / Their cheeks, but downy lullings with it bore" (p. 21); "and pouted lips to kiss / The downy breeze" (p. 25)—that blend palpable and impalpable tactual experience, and which derive from the out-of-focus "Cockney" usages of Leigh Hunt. Perhaps, though, the poet is here suggesting thistle-down borne on the breeze, or even the presence of proto-Brontëan moths. In Death's Jest-book, however, the mannerism becomes luminously meaningful, and turns sleep into a soft, pillowy presence not unlike the cloud-enwrapped Jupiter embracing Io in Correggio’s picture: Soft sleep enwrap thee: with his balm bedew Thy young fair limbs, Sibylla: thou didst need The downy folding of his arms about thee.95

When all is said and done, there is no denying that the finale achieves a "luxe, calme et volupté" that countervails the violence and derangement of the stormy tale. "Albert and Emily" has beauties enough to compensate for its crudities, and it repays repeated reading. There is a special fascination in its habit of stylizing concrete observation, and in the way Beddoes recycles again and again a curtailed repertoire of images (blueness; downiness). In conjunction with each other, they flatten percepts into an arresting, vivid cloissoné. At the same time, for all its highly wrought colourfulness, it evokes only a vaguely imagined space, but a Bower of Bliss, even so, in which real violets grow beside the painted metal ivy of Spenser’s imagination. To that extent it achieves a more concrete existence than the noetic transactions of allegory. Donner has pointed out that while the Romantics lacked a "strict historical sense," it was "hardly called for in the dim ages of folk-lore and legend: there everything was vague and uncertain, and the imagination was given a scope as wide as possible."96 "Albert and Emily" is as an artefact enamelled and brilliant in some respects, but "vague and ucertain" in others. In the induction of the second fytte (entitled "Rodolph the Wild"), Beddoes forgets the snow storm of the first, and sends the improvisatore out into a vernal landscape:

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Chapter Two Again the feasters sang and laughed, Again the beaded wine was quaffed: The youth retired alone, unseen, To wander o'er the fringy green Of moonlight meadows, and to gaze Upon the water-mirrored rays Of stars, . . . (pp. 27-28)

Or perhaps, since the mistake is too egregious to have been overlooked, it indicates the narrator’s power to abbreviate or prolong the passage of time: I am speaking of cases where the story practises a hermetical magic, a temporal distortion of perspective reminding one of certain abnormal and transcendental experiences in actual life. We have records of opium dreams in which the dreamer, during a brief narcotic sleep, had experiences stretching over a period of ten, thirty, sixty years, or even passing the extreme limit of man's temporal capacity for experience:97

The narrational time of "Albert and Emily" would present just such a "distortion of perspective," with ice on the holly in the first induction, the water that reflects a stars in the second. If the seasons were consistently rendered, the green should be mantled in snow, but it happens to be "fringy"—an adjectival suffix, incidentally, that Crossan calls "modish or jocular,"98 but which the poet has more probably invented for a fauxmedieval effect à la Leigh Hunt or Keats. Beddoes's imagination, as we have seen, derives its power from being canalized obsessively into certain areas, but this obsessiveness can also trench on monotony. Just as the dramatis personae of his plays all speak the same language and voice the same thoughts, so the blazon of the second induction covers old ground: "Adown her fair and glowing cheek there hung / A cluster of slight auburn curls, that clung / To her brows tenderly. A brilliancy / Fell on them from the sunshine of her eye" (p. 18). Compare that with "Light from her eyelids seemed to soar, / Her beauteous cheeks lay clustered o'er / With curling tufts of amber thread / That twined around her pillowed head" (p. 28), and one has a distinct sense of déjà vu. The same palimpsestic air obtains in the poet's treatment of sweet sounds. In "Albert and Emily," we have the "honey-smothered murmurs of a bee" (p. 18) and here "bees, whose wings are honey-clung, / Bubbling through sweetness." In the tale of Rodolph, too, the poet's imagination clings to a rich but circumscribed collection tropes and motifs. Although the hero is nominally a shepherd, his Germanic name points us away from Arcadia and in a Gothic direction. Beddoes opens the tale with a tableau of mortality in

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which the gnomic present recalls the subscriptions of an emblem book, and leaves us uncertain as to whether we confronting a paysage moralisé or an actual landscape: There is a massy cloud of dismal hue, Climbing reluctantly the pathless blue; It is the pall of the departed day; And, after it, the self-same silent way, A heavy troop of mist-clad mourners wend, And down the lampless, dim horizon bend. The grave and cradle of short-lived time, Ocean, receives them with its gaping billows, And with the hoarse notes, which its death-song chime, Lulls on its breast the infant day it pillows. (p. 29)

The nocturnal mist, rendered as so many muffled mourners, carries forward the conceit initiated in "pall"—the latter drawn via Gray's "Elegy" from the Eighth Canto of Purgatorio ("s'e' ode squilla di lontano / che paia il giorno pianger che si more"—"if he hears in the distance the bell that seems to mourn the dying day"99). Beddoes gives the concetto an unusual twist when the lemming-like cortège of mourners marches to extinction, death upon death occurring in a sublimely "lampless" void. The poet recalls "the Cradle and the Grave"100 reference in "Grongar Hill," reversing its logical sequence to produce the same purposeful jar as the "misaligned" distributives in Shakespeare's "Sonnet 73": "yellow leaves, or none or few."101 "Grongar Hill" has also suggested the "gaping billows" that swallow time in this emblem-cum-landscape ("Sometimes swift, and sometimes slow, / Wave succeeding Wave they go / A various Journey to the Deep, / Like human life to endless Sleep!"—p. 91), along with Prospero's "dark backward and abysm of time" (The Tempest 1.2.50) and Warton's "Pleasures of Melancholy" ("Now let soft Juliet in the gaping tomb / Print the last kiss on her true Romeo's lips"102). Just as the topos of the pietà combines the ideas of nursing and mourning, so Beddoes blends berceuse with threnody. The sea is lulling the infant day to death: "And with the hoarse notes, which its death-song chime, / Lulls on its breast the infant day it pillows." In the next stanza, twilight becomes the ghost of "murdered hours," its seeping blood registered by the red horizon ("Baring to the earth its breathless, fog-veiled, breast, / Declaring how the nameless moments die / Of the red wound, that blushes in the west"), and tinting the petals that enter the tableau as a "carpe florem" topos:

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Chapter Two But on their best-loved flowers, that perished brood, Cast their last kiss of perfume and of blood, Tinge with their dying breath some opening bloom, And breathe one sigh; then hurry to their tomb.

The proximity of "opening bloom" and "tomb" harks back to the "gaping billows" of the first stanza, and the red "lip of innocence" to the doomed infant day. Prolepsis kills the blooms even in their freshness—"perished flowers"—a participle all the more poignant for having displaced the expected "cherished." Beddoes then slips from gnomic present into narrative past, closing his emblem book as it were, and opening a landscape portfolio in its place. Compounded from elements half imagined, half-recollected, the scenery anticipates the "unbridled phantasmagoria"103 of the plays. Although Beddoes would certainly have been familiar with Clifton Gorge, and probably took that topographical feature as his point of departure, the "bubbling waterfalls" of Rodolph's madrigal derive from a wholly fanciful landscape: "By shallow rivers, to whose falls / Melodious birds sing madrigals."104 This and the other literary elements in the composition fail, however, to attenuate its pictorial vividness. Beddoes has borrowed the idea of spaces sacred to poetry from Hunt ("With bowering leaves o'erhead, to which the eye / Looked up half sweetly and half awfully,— / Places of nestling green for poets made"105), and opposes it to the overt artifice of the court: It was a place for lovers' gentle plaint, Afar from glittering show and boisterous halls, Where, from her bower of blossoms, echo faint Attuned her voice to bubbling waterfalls. (p. 30)

Rodolph’s madrigal doesn't altogether escape the charge of pastiche, but has enough imaginative energy to ring changes on the Jonson lyric that it has inspired it: Have you seene but a bright Lillie grow, Before rude hands have touch'd it? Ha' you mark'd but the fall o' the Snow Before the soyle hath smutch'd it? Ha' you felt the wooll o' the Bever? Or Swans Downe ever? Or have smelt o' the bud o' the Brier? Or the Nard in the fire? Or have tasted the bag of the Bee? O so white! O so soft! O so sweet is she.106

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Jonson had enriched his blazon by casting it as a kenning, something absent from the simpler inventories, say, of Spenser's Amoretti: Fayre is my love, when her fayre golden heares, with the loose wynd ye wauing chance to marke: fayre when the rose in her red cheekes appeares, or in her eyes the fyre of loue does sparke.107

Beddoes followed his example in the madrigal, melding the similes themselves (rather than the raw data) into a compound comparison: How sweet is the voice of the beauty I love, As the violet's scent at eventide; As the first, softest, sigh of the nestling dove, As the laughter of fairies when they ride. As soft as the evening breeze, As sweet as the blackbird's song, As gentle as summer bees That flutter the garden among. (p. 30)

Sweetness of tone is more usually linked to taste than to smell—consider the "sugar'd words" in King Henry VI Part 1 3.3.18, and the "enchanting language, sugar-cane"108 in Herbert's "Forerunners"—but Beddoes achieves an effect less palpable by connecting the beloved's voice with the notion of fragrance. His aural similes are equally hard to pin down, the sigh of nestlings isn’t a sound universally acknowledged, and laughing fairies belong to that impossible Schoolman's world of dancing angels. Beddoes has used an antique model in the same way that Arthur Sullivan did when he came to compose: "Sometimes the parody is direct: more often he fastens on a composer (e.g. Handel) or form (e.g. madrigal) and absorbs as much of it as gets his own invention running."109 The rich abundance of Rodolph's recitation derives in part from the litany in "Sleep and Poetry"— What is more tranquil than a musk-rose blowing In a green island, far from all men's knowing? More healthful than the leafiness of dales? More secret than a nest of nightingales? More serene than Cordelia's countenance? More full of visions than a high romance?110

—and from the double-take of Herrick's "Upon Julia's Clothes"—"Then, then (me thinks)"; "Next, when I"111—and so offers two visions of the beloved: "How sweet is the voice of the beauty I love"; "But, oh! when she

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chides with her beautiful lips." He develops the comparisons by revoking the charges of loudness, anger and harshness even as he adduces them: "As loud as the angry showers, / As harsh as the zephyr in May." One suspects that, had Palgrave published the lyric in The Golden Treasury (as he did Darley's "It is not beauty I demand"112), Victorian readers, not yet fully attuned to nature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century verse, might also have mistaken Beddoes’s madrigal for the real thing. The dramatic "Also sprach" after the song gives a ritual gravity to its recital, recalling the end of "The Bard"—"He spoke, and headlong from the mountain's height" (Gray, p. 113)—and ushers in the siren music that will be the hero's undoing. Beddoes intimates this by dissolving and reshaping the stanza ad hoc: He ceased. And was it Echo, that poured round So sweet, so sad, so musical a sound, Winding around his sense with fainting note, Like closing circles in a parted moat? It cannot be; again are borne along The whispered burthens of a distant song. There seemed an hundred voices flying nigh, Bearing their sweetness to his strained ear; At length the flowrets with a scented sigh Tremblingly echoed, 'Follow, follow, Dear; 'Follow, follow, follow, 'Over mount, and over hollow, 'Follow.' (31)

The prepositional traductio ("round"; "around") and the rondure of "circles" and "moat" both suggest completion and containment, but as the strophic scheme expands from dizain to treizain, the poem seems to burst its banks, following, like Rodolph himself, an impulsion from outside. Beddoes seems to hint at "The Mermaid's Song," a Haydn canzonetta that was almost certainly sung in Clifton parlours—"Come with me, and we will go / Where the rocks of coral grow, / Follow, follow, follow me, / Follow, follow, follow me"114—but the tone darkens when he sets up a syncretic mythology from Exodus (the parting of the Red Sea and the column of smoke and fire) and Malory's Morte d'Arthur ("and in the myddis, Arthure was ware of an arme clothed in whyght samyte, that held a fayre swerde in that honde"115). Royall Snow warns us against patronizing the early Beddoes ("It is rather easy—and on the whole not fair—to condescend to The Brides' Tragedy"116), but ignores his own monition when he scoffs at "Rodolph the Wild": "A pillar of fire astonishingly chooses a lake to burst out of,

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scarring the water, and a fiery hand beckons the shepherd Rodolph to mysterious purlieus and beautiful women" (p. 20). For a start, one can't subject romance inventions to the test of common sense, and even if that wrong-headed kind of criticism be allowed to obtain, it had better base itself on attentive reading. The pillar scars the lake bed rather than the water ("Leaving a deep and steaming scar behind"—p. 32), a bed quite logically disclosed when the water evaporates in consequence of the fire: Straightway the sportive billows arched on high, And from the flower-strewn bed of the calm stream Up shot a fiery pillar . . . (p. 31)

Such transmutations go back to Virgil's shape-shifting Proteus: tum variae eludent species atque ora ferarum. Fiet enim subito sus horridus atraque tigris Squamosusque droco et fulva cervice laeana, aut acrem flammae sonitum dabit atque ita vinclis Excidit, aut in aquas tenuis dilapsus abibit. [. . . then will manifold forms baffle thee, and figures of wild beasts. For of a sudden he will become a bristly boar, a deadly tiger, a scaly serpent, or a lioness with tawny neck; or he will give forth the fierce roar of flame, and thus slip from his fetters, or he will melt into fleeting water and be gone.]117

By darting from simile to simile—ball, eye, bees, wings, serpent, hand, canoe, dog—Beddoes produces a comparable effect of mysterious intangibility. He has recourse to another epic for the siren song that follows, for The Odyssey offers us the same image of a man seduced from duty by music: "The lovely voices came to me across the water, and my heart was filled with such a longing to listen that with nod and frown I signed to my men to set me free."118. As Homer's sirens displace Penelope from the mind of Odysseus, so Beddoes's banish all thought of Anna from the consciousness of the shepherd. That it marks a new chapter in his life can be gathered from a variant of the quest formula ("RODOLPH sprung up") associated with the chanson d'aventure ("Als I me rode this endre day"119): RODOLPH sprung up; it was not ANNA's song, Who bade him stay; it had attractive force: Forgetting her, who made him wait so long, He rushed to trace the music to its source.

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The song itself is another instance of Elizabethan pastiche, begotten here upon the Age of Sensibility. Beddoes has remembered Spenser's "Prothalamion," where nymphs scatter a "Great store of Flowers, the honour of the field" (p. 601)— Hither haste and gently strew His velvet path with odorous dew Which slept on roses' cheeks a night;

—and blent into it an echo of the "Ode to Evening" ("The fragrant Hours, and elves / Who slept in flowers the day"120). "Hither haste and gently fling / All the opening buds of spring" also pays homage to Gray's "Ode on the Spring" ("Cool zephyrs through the clear blue sky / Their gathered fragrance fling"—p. 49), while "hang a spangle" recalls the fairy in A Midsummer Night's Dream 2.1.15 that must "hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear." An eldritch note is sounded in the final stanza, which morphs out of shape as the portent itself has done. Subtitled "The Change," it seems at first to recall the sort of Englishing of classical terms that we find in Jonson ("Turne," "Counter-turne" and "Stand"—pp. 210 ff.), but we learn soon enough that this is not the "change" (="exchange") of an envoi, but rather a change of tone and ultimately of circumstance. For the stanza in question, like that unsettling chord, the diminished seventh, offers resolution in different and competing directions: They are waiting for you, Whose forms you ne'er saw, Their eyes are dimmed with dew, The warm sigh they draw. Then follow, follow, follow; Over bank and over hollow Still with fearless footstep follow. (p. 33)

"They are waiting for you," while it might carry a charge of erotic expectancy, also evokes the ambush projected in the "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College": "Yet see how all around 'em wait / The ministers of human fate, / And black Misfortune's baleful train!" (Gray, Collins and Goldsmith, p. 60). The "forms you ne'er saw" are both as potentially monstrous and benign as the spirits of the "Ode Written in the Beginning of the Year 1746"—"By forms unseen their dirge is sung" (Gray, Collins and Goldsmith, p. 437). We also can't be sure if the sighs are drawn intransitively (signifying the breath of life), or transitively (the death that draws sighs as a vampire draws out blood).

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A marked fermata, produced both by the caesura and a break in the "sound track"—"Silence engulphed the words"—recalls the desert quiet that supervenes on the boast at the end of "Ozymandias," and also, perhaps, the "the silence in heaven" described in Rev. 8.1. After which portentous pause, Rodolph resumes his headlong quest. The path of his dalliance is strewed with notional primroses ("as he stepped, fresh buds bloomed at his feet"), a trope of pastoral hyperbole familiar from Pope's "Summer" ("Where-e'er you tread, the blushing Flow'rs shall rise"121). Poets more accomplished in the management of narrative would have thought twice at this point, but, as Northrop Frye points out, no less in lyric than in drama, Beddoes "did not sufficiently realize that the plot was an obstacle to his . . . utterance."122 Dr Johnson's apercu about Richardson— Why, Sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment."123

—applies no less to the narrative laxities of "The Improvisatore," which we read not for the stories but for the rich and prolonged ecphrases that have been hung upon them. One such ecphrasis relays an earthly paradise at the start of Stanza X. Beddoes has modelled this on Spenser's Bower of Bliss, though he omits the marine element of the topos: "as the great Spenserian image of the Gardens of Adonis is at the center of the earthly and sexual world, so the Bower of Bliss, which also has marine associations in Spenser, is at the center of the water-world."124 He also futher darkens it with the Germanic and Nordic idea of the subterranean pleasaunce—the Venusberg of the Tannhäuser legend, and the Elverhøj of Danish folk-lore. Gade's cantata Elverskud, indeed, bears some similarities to "Rodolph the Wild": Thi råder jeg hver dannis svend, som ride vil i skove, han ride sig ikke til Elverhøj og laegge sig der at sove. [Then youths, if through the wood you ride, When night repose is bringing, Turn from the elf-king's mound aside, Though songs through the air be ringing.]125

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Spenser's grottos of destruction have no deceptive veneer (the cave of Error in The Faerie Queene I.i, for example, is a "darksome hole"—p. 5), unlike the more attractive "elfin grot" in "La Belle Dame sans Merci" (Keats, p. 352) Beddoes's resembles the latter, its fixtures conceived in organic terms somewhat at odds with the Gestalt of a Regency ballroom ("hall"; "crystal blaze"; "silken gloss"): He entered with expectant, glad, amaze, And soon he found that narrow lane of moss Led to a hall, built up of crystal blaze, And softened all around with silken gloss. (p. 35)

Then a waterweed simile reconfigures the curtains in foliate shapes instead of the formal swags that "silken" brings to mind: Through silken curtains, gently curved below, Stilly crept moonlight beams; so glittering weeds Peep through the cloudy waters where they grow, Among the fickle sands and pebble beads. (p. 35)

These moonlit curtains look ahead to Hans Andersen's take on "The ElfinMount"—"The Elfin-maidens were still dancing in the Elfin-mount; they danced in long scarfs woven from mist and moonlight, and for those who like that sort of thing, it looked pretty enough."126 But whereas Andersen gives a tart, Lucianic tone to his fantasy, Beddoes generates a sense of unease by a sinister combination of "fickle" and "sand." Pebble beds turn into bibelots ("beads") at the stroke of a vowel, recalling the "pebble-bead" of Endymion (Keats, p. 83), while "balls of amber radiance" impart a mineral permanence to the cocoons already evoked by "silken gloss": Deep in the leaves of mossy-bedded posies, Of sickly lilies, violets and roses, Nestled bright balls of amber radiance, Which cast on all the shrubs a starry glance; Like the bright silk-worm, which its cradle weaves Unseen amongst the mulberry's curled leaves: And on the down-lined leaflet's inside moss, Drooped lengthened tears of crystal, quivering studs Of melted light, around they poured their gloss, And dyed, with mimic rainbows, all the buds.

Another hint of disquiet comes from the "sickly" lilies, and from the "curled leaves" of the mulberry, the curl of which can be explained by the

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tension of the threads, but which also hints at their desiccation. The buds owe their colour to the pendent lustres of a chandelier, "mimic rainbows" at an epiphenomenal remove from real pigments. Beddoes also repeats the hint of artifice in the next stanza, strewing "bud-like glitterings" (instead of flowers) over the temptress's couch. The disquiet finally climaxes in the spontaneous conversion of the pleasure palace into a charnel house, a metamorphosis all the more arresting for being so unusual. Evil is more generally discovered by conscious espionage, such as Glaucus’ in Book III of Endymion, which allows him to see The banquet of my arms, my arbour queen, Seated upon an uptorn forest root; And all around her shapes, wizard and brute, Laughing, and wailing, groveling, serpenting, Showing tooth, tusk, and venom-bag, and sting! O such deformities. (Keats, p. 118)

—or by acts of conscious intervention, as when Spenser's Duessa is forciblydisrobed and shown for what she is: So as she bad, that witch they disaraid, And robd of royall robes, and purple pall, And ornaments that richly were diplaid; Ne spared they to strip her naked all. Then when they had despoild her tire and call, Such as she was, their eyes might her behold, That her misshaped parts did them appall— A loathly, wrinkled hag, ill fauoured, old, Whose secret filth good manners biddeth not be told. (p. 44)

On the other hand, a precedent for Beddoes’s idea of a latent rather than a blatant evil is the apparition Helen in Doctor Faustus, a succubus that drains off the protagonist's soul, Marlowe having secured this "pay-off" by the "set-up" of a dumbshow in 1.5—"Enter a DEVIL dressed like a woman, with fireworks."127 The "immortal kiss" for which Faustus yearns is therefore its very converse: "Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. / Her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies" (p. 333). With the loss of Rodolph's faux paradise comes a touch of verbal coarsening like that at the end of "Albert and Emily." Here, as there, Beddoes must shift from the beautiful to the sublime and once again pull out all the stops of his adolescent rhetoric. It produces the same feverish, congested expression, a dress rehearsal for the "florid Gothic"128 of which he would later become the master, but a dress rehearsal only:

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Not sure if brittle mummy bones trump freshly mutilated flesh as objects of horror, Beddoes opts for both in a farraginous jumble. But even if the verse skids out of control, it sometimes succeeds by its very excess, catching the flesh-disgusted note of Jacobean drama on the one hand and the solemnities of the ars moriendi of a Holbein Totentanz on the other: He saw his welcomer, the ribs that kept No prisoned heart within their crumbled bars, And to his eyeless sockets fat worms crept, Whose eyes peeped out like lurid meteor stars. (p. 37)

Rodolph in the charnel house becomes a Vanitas tableau, his improbable garland of snakes and splinters even hinting at the "spinea corona" of the Man of Sorrows: He tossed the bones about, and whispered low With bloodless lips; and with the struggling snakes And jagged splinters fashioned round his brow, A garland, gemmed o'er with bloody flakes. (p. 38)

Beddoes arrives here at a point ne plus ultra, belying Bamforth's suggestion that it was only when he moved to Germany that he wrote "more outrageously Jacobean" verse (p. 37). "The Improvisatore" is quite as "outrageously Jacobean," even if, like a demonic antitype to Arnold's Shelley, its author beat his wings ineffectually in a void. In the absence of a controlling allegorical frameworks such as we find in The Faerie Queene and Endymion, the arbitrary developments in "Rodolph the Wild" have no significance beyond themselves and remain . . . arbitrary—this because the seductress lacks the signifying purpose of Duessa and Acrasia. It's not enough to display "skull beneath the skin"129 if the skin affords inadequate thematic coverage to begin with. Beddoes offers no explanation as to why the hero arrives at this pass, nor why he was sent on the quest in the first place. Whatever Rodolph's experience might ultimately mean, we are under no obligation to accept the crude proposition, lodged in a matchingly crude psychoanalysis, that it figures "the sexual act, an anal-sadistic one."130

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Whatever its meaning, it effectively turns the shepherd into a poète maudit, not unlike the scapegoat figure in "Adonais" ("He came the last, neglected and apart; / A herd-abandoned deer struck by the hunter's dart"131). Spending the rest of his life "amongst the woods and untrod ways," he becomes a sinister counterpart of the Lucy who "dwelt among untrodden ways," 132 and also an avatar of the melancholy isolato in the "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard." The fact that he "sate among the tombs and called the dead / With voice familiar" (p. 38), recalls a similar moment in the Eton draft of that poem: If chance that e'er some pensive Spirit more, By sympathetic Musings here delay'd, With vain, tho' kind, Enquiry shall explore Thy once-loved Haunt, this long-deserted Shade.133

Beddoes eventually sets the dying man in the midst of children at play, a collocation looking ahead to Hood's "Hero and Leander"— And where he swam, the constant sun lies sleeping Over the verdant plain that makes his bed; And all the noisy waves go freshly leaping, Like gamesome boys over the churchyard dead;134

—and back, perhaps, to Werther. For just as death subtends the innocence of childhood in "Rodolph the Wild"— . . . But the children crept With terror from their sports, and, lisping, told Of the dread comer; the next one who stepped Up to the hillock found him dead and cold. (p. 39)

—so Goethe juxtaposes childish innocence with death: "the eldest, of whom he had always been fondest, kissed his lips until he expired, and then the boy had to be forcibly taken away."135 Nor should we forget the example afforded by Southey's "After Blenheim," where a skull, like the tomb associated with "Et in Arcadia Ego," unexpectedly darkens the horizon of childhood: She saw her brother Peterkin Roll something large and round Which he beside the rivulet In playing there had found; He came to ask what he had found That was so large and smooth and round.136

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Beddoes forgoes a ceremonious coda so as to end his tale as harshly as he can, a device also reminiscent of The Sorrows of Young Werther: "There were fears for Lotte's life. Guildsmen bore the body. No priest attended him" (p. 134). It also evokes the laconic kind of closure favoured by the balladeers, for "Annan Water" ends with uncompromising bleakness ("But the stream was broad, and her strength did fail, / And he never saw his bonny lady"137) and so does "Edom O'Gordon" ("And soon i' the Gordon's foul heart's blude / He's wroken his deare ladye"—2:493). Beddoes begins the third induction of "The Improvisatore" almost as unceremoniously as he had ended the second fytte: The tale was said. Fair AGNES rose, And tripped to court a night's repose; There in her chamber soon she lay, (Her every dream with warblings gay Of fairies serenaded,) hidden 'Midst folds of warmth, while night-clouds, ridden By thought-winged visions, and bright fringed With rosy thoughts, her slumbers tinged; (p. 39)

Agnes's reception of the tale acts as a Verfremdungseffekt, the lighthearted manner in which she trips away suggesting her indifference to Rodolph's plight. Just as Keats engulfs the heroine of "The Eve of Saint Agnes" in a "poppied warmth of sleep" (p. 202) that contrasts with the frosty night outside, Beddoes presents an Agnes "Hidden / 'Midst folds of warmth" (p. 39), and also offsets her youth with a wrinkled beldame— Madeline's Angela by a different name: And ancient MARGARET caught his eye. She was an old and tottering crone; Her skin was shrivelled round the bone, And seemed a sear-cloth wrapped around A 'wakened mummy. (p. 40)

But even as he borrows these elements from Keats, Beddoes franks them with a certain individuality, imaging Margaret as a Lazarus figure reeking of the tomb, foretaste of the resurrectees in Death's Jest-Book. He also half-compounds her with Keats's beadsman, telling the linked chain of his rosary with frosted breath: Her voice came stumbling o'er her teeth, Half frozen by her misty breath, Chaining the ear with broken links Of muttered words.

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The macabre blend of Eros and Thanatos in Margaret's advances ("With joyful winks, / And shivering hands, that tried to clasp / The songster in their feeble grasp") anticipate the equally bizarre compounds—mother's milk and blood, for example—in the next and final tale. "Leopold" begins with dactyllic tetrameter couplets inspired by Byron's "Destruction of Sennacherib," and, as in that poem, they recall the programmatic gallop of Aeneid VIII: "Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum" ["with galloping tramp the horse-hoof shakes the crumbling plain"].138 In "Leopold," however, they also represent the relentless pounding of soldiers under hoof. Byron renders disease rather than war as the vector of death, and leaves the human form intact—"And there lay the rider distorted and pale, / With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail,"139Beddoes, on the other hand, opts for a terrible pulping: "A swamp of distorted faces it lay, / And sweltered and bubbled in the broad day" (p. 41), the spondee of "-torted faces" offering an aural image of clotted deformation. The opening—"The battle is over"—recalls "Finita jam sunt proelia," a hymn that Beddoes probably encountered at the Charterhouse, but the relief of an illusory end yields to far greater and continuing horrors. There is nothing new in this of course, for Homer himself laced the Iliad with unremitting violence: "He struck Oenomaus full in the belly, breaking the plate of his corslet, through which the spearpoint let his bowels out. Oenomaus fell down in the dust and clutched at the ground."140 However the eighteenth century had supervened between Beddoes and Homer, and cast a gloss over such naked sadism, accommodating its cruelties to the ethos of politesse. In other words, Pope and his congeners had used the heroic couplet as an instrument of mitigation: The forceful Spear his hollow Corselet broke, It ripp'd his Belly with a ghastly Wound, And roll'd the smoaking Entrails on the Ground. Stretch'd on the Plain, he sobs away his Breath, And furious, grasps the bloody Dust in Death.141

Here the trim and stylish versification distances the horror, gathering up entrails in a neat concentricity, and using a definite article ("the smoaking Entrails") to objectify (and so to soften) the pain that would have registered more vividly through "his." At the same time, however, Homer’s stoic narration is tempered with empathy ("sobs away"), and superimposed with a value judgement relating to the violence ("ghastly Wound"). The whole tenor of Augustan civilization had set its face against brutality, so much so indeed that a commentator remarks of Handel's

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Saulthat "the fiery clash of ancient arms defeated his decorous transcription."142 Unlike their immediate predecessors, however, the poets of Sensibility tried to re-engage with the violence of "primitive" poetry: "See the grisly texture grow, / ('Tis of human entrails made.)" (Gray, p. 217). Beddoes takes up where they left off, and ferociously runs with the topic: The dead are all reeking, a ghastly heap, Slippery with gore, and with crushed bones steep: As if the flesh had been snowed on the hills, And dribbled away in blood-clammy rills; A swamp of distorted faces it lay, And sweltered and bubbled in the broad day. (p. 41)

One wonders if this image of bodies thus indifferently pulped and liquefied helped shape Hunt’s anti-epinicion, "Captain Sword and Captain Pen": Down go bodies, snap burst eyes; Trod on the ground are tender cries; Brains are dashed against plashing ears;143

And perhaps it also found issue in Dickens's Battle of Life: "The stream ran red. The trodden ground became a quagmire, whence, from sullen pools collected in the prints of human feet and horses' hoofs, the one prevailing hue still lowered and glimmered at the sun."144 Be that as it may, Beddoes presents his war as an elemental force that snows flesh on the hills, while the lamenting sky—"And the clouds of heaven, with sable fringed, / Are weeping the murder"—harks back to a similar moment in Paradise Lost, Book IX— . . . Nature gave a second groan, Sky low'r'd, and muttering Thunder, some sad drops Wept at completing of the mortal Sin Original;145

—and to Young's own adaptation of the conceit: Heaven wept, that men might smile! Heaven bled, that man Might never die!146

A soldier struggles "in vain with feeble splash / Under the warm tomb of motionless dead"—a catachresis that contrasts the solidity of "tomb" with the liquidity of "splash"—and we can't be sure if the "opening wound" that

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discloses the soldier to the plunderer is on his person or if it’s a path cloven through corpses: And was creeping with torture along the ground, Tracking his path with an opening wound; But a plunderer, spying his failing form, Scattered his brains as hot food for the storm.

This nightmarish confusion extends to Leopold himself, at one moment smiling on "his death-frozen mother's chilly breast," and at the next filling "her deaf ears with his piteous cries." Nor does the hermit seem sympathetic when he moves along like a prayer-muttering juggernaut, apparently indifferent to the men he treads underfoot. Beddoes makes his progress the more laboured by letting iambs supervene to slow him down: A reverend hermit weak and bent, Muttering prayers with a tremulous tongue, Whilst groans of despair at his deafened ears hung. As he slipped on the dead men they started and howled,(pp. 41-42)

When he takes up Leopold, he fits into that iconic convention showing Antony of Padua and Joseph with babes in arms, and the tableau also owes something to the smiling infant in Gray’s "Progress of Poesy": To him the mighty Mother did unveil Her awful face: the dauntless child Stretched forth his little arms and smiled. (p. 172)

However, Leopold's bloody lips immediately subvert these pious antecedents: The holy man raised up the smiling boy, Who laughed, and held his blood-tinged fingers up; His lip was moist, as though he'd made a cup Out of some foaming wound: he turned and cried, And struggled from the gentle father's side, And played with the torn flesh as with a toy. (p. 42)

The infant Jesus is often enough represented with "toys"—a goldfinch in Crivelli's Bache Madonna (Metropolitan Museum of New York), emblem of the passion, and the three portentous nails in Botticelli's Madonna with Book and Child in the Museo Poldi-Pezzoli—"toys" that Beddoes displaces and demonizes with gobbets of human flesh. As the hermit lulls his diabolical child to sleep, he beams "a pure sprite, like fresh rain down /

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Upon the weak and suffering," a lustral image that modifies the bloodiness with memories of The Merchant of Venice 4.1.180-82 ("The quality of mercy is not strain'd, / It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the place beneath"). Hitherto a "reverend hermit weak and bent," the votary now rushes home with improbable speed, showing again that Beddoes versifies from hand to mouth, often forgetting the larger scheme of things in the impulse of the moment: "With joy, that winged his feet, kind Hubert bore / His blooming burthen onward to his cell" (p. 42). More than twenty lines are assigned to the narration of the journey, an expansiveness that issues in many incidental beauties. For example, an adjectival doublet ("bright"/"bright") expands the force field of the rhyme ("Which beaded ivy bowered, and a bright stream / Girdled, besprinkled with the sun's bright beam"), and blurs the boundary between dazzling light and water in a way that recalls the "Ode on the Spring" ("And float amid the liquid noon"—Gray, p. 51). Beddoes furthermore roots his catalogue of flowers in the ecphrasis of Titania's bower (A Midsummer Night's Dream 2.2.249 ff) and in the floral tribute in "Lycidas." It's worth noting that, violets here lose the incandescent blue he had assigned them in "Albert and Emily," registering as tone rather than chrome ("violets too / Dark coloured seemed the passer's smile to woo"—p. 43). Beddoes also rings an arresting change on an old trope when the flowers track Hubert's passage through the landscape instead of rising in his wake: "And seemed to know his footstep, for they cast / Up their soft cups and quivered as he passed." This confirms his role as a nurturer, though he comically elides his adoptive plants ("He loved them as his children, innocent / And sweet") with the child he is carrying, and beds the latter on wet leaves: . . . of these he plucked a set, The freshest and the fairest, and most wet; And strewed them plentifully on a nest Of moss, and laid the baby to its rest.

Paediatricians would almost certainly doubt the wisdom of that! Touching juxtapositions of vigilance and sleeping innocence stretch back to King Lear 4.7.26-27 ("O my dear father! Restoration hang / Thy medicine upon my lips") and forward to Auden's "Lullaby" ("Lay your sleeping head, my love, / Human on my faithless arm" 147), and to those instances one could subjoin two lines from "Leopold": "Oh it is sweet to watch o'er innocence / Asleep, and mark the calm breast fall and rise." Beddoes sounds a faint note of disquiet through the reversed sequence of "fall and rise." The foregrounding of "fall" proves a propos, for in the brief

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Bildungsroman that subsequently unfolds, Leopold's character grows out of his blood-suckled infancy: It was a froward babe, and never laughed, Nor stole a kiss by courtesy or craft, Nor with its out-stretched arms his bosom clipped, Nor in the evening blithely round him tripped. (p. 43)

This provides a demonic counterpoint to the cooperative and kindly childhood of "Three years she grew," where Wordsworth's Lucy finds in storms the lineaments of grace— Nor shall she fail to see Even in the motions of the Storm Grace that shall mould the Maiden's form By silent sympathy. (p. 148)

Leopold, by contrast, treats violent weather as a source of Faustian lore: He knew no playmates but the stormy blasts, Which seemed to whisper some dark, secret, dread As he would sleep among them, with his head Swathed in lank dripping tresses, and cry out With joy to his rude playmates . . . (pp. 43-44)

One suspects that Beddoes (or Donner) has mispunctuated here, for the commas effectively turn "dread" into a substantive, whereas the subject would have entertained no fear of the dreadful secret ("secret dread") imparted by the storm. Just as in Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," emotional reciprocity connects the self with its elemental counterpart— . . . If even I were as in my boyhood, and could be The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven, As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed Scarce seemed a vision; . . . (p. 617)

—so Leopold's "lank dripping tresses" make him the embodiment of the storm. His effort to unite with it is at first purely subjective, the "verba cogitandi" set in cautious brackets: "while his shout / (He thought,) was written in the lightning red" (p. 44). But by shifting from "He thought" to "he felt," Beddoes actualizes the adunaton of a brow bound with "a bright snake of fire." These "writhed fire-snakes in his hair" masterfully portmanteau "wreathe" and "writhe."

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The Shelleyan urgency yields to quietude, and a de facto "Ode to Time" of great poise and beauty. The contraction of the line length to a "chiave"-like dimeter ("Of some vast lake") and the prelusive tightening of the pentameters ("Of loitering Eternity"; "Like piling snow upon the waves") recall the undulating stanza of Collins's "Ode to Evening," and also the brief odic moment in "I Stood Tiptoe Upon a Little Hill," where four-stress lines break rank with the surrounding pentameters ("Open afresh your round of starry folds, / Ye ardent marigolds"—p. 4). But if Collins and Keats supplied the precedent for such programmatic linear contraction, Shelley inspired the suggestive fuzziness and impalpability of the imagery, imagery that disallows any attempt at fixing—or even fully visualizing—its connections. In such phrases as "tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean" (Shelley, p. 616), the difficulty arises from the poet's application of rigid form to impalpable substance, something that also occurs in Beddoes, except that he tends to force conjunctions of the physical with the defiantly abstract. Although dispensing with the tired personification of Father Time, he still tries to corporealize it as a dying presence, one that defers its end by eluding timelessness itself: 'Ye swiftly flitting hours of day and night, 'Half dim and dusk, half sunny bright, 'Like feathers moulting from the pied wing 'Of breathless time, who flutters evermore, 'This ball of earth and ocean girdling, 'Searching the crevices of sea and shore, 'Which still defy his strength with billowy roar, 'To spy some cranny, which the light ne'er saw, 'Chaotic and forgotten, wherein he 'May 'scape the gulp of the sepulchral jaw 'Of loitering Eternity.[']

The absorption of dynamic time into stasis recalls the philosophy of the younger Eleatics, Melissus of Samos claiming that since . . . it has not come into being, and since it is, was ever, and ever shall be, it has no beginning or end, but is without limit. For, if it had come into being, it would have had a beginning . . . but, if it neither began nor ended, and ever was and ever shall be, it has no beginning or end; for it is not possible for anything to be ever without all being.148

And, if we go back further still to Xenophanes, we find a similar postulate concerning a phenomenon that "sees all over, thinks all over, hears all over,"149 proving static and illimitable all the while.

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Beddoes registers the extinction of time as it drives toward its own effacement in languid slow motion. He blends moulting days and nights with the perpetual dissolution of human lives, and weaves a sensed but ultimately elusive web of connections between time, life, falling feathers and falling snow: 'Our lives still fall and fall, flake upon flake, 'Like piling snow upon the waves 'Of some vast lake, 'And melt way into the caves, 'Whilst rising bubbles waste them, as they break 'Like ye, from our own substance, as ye pass 'Our essence still ye pilfer, onward fleeing; 'We vanish, as a thing that never was, 'And become drops of the huge ever-being.['] (pp. 44-45)

These delicate erasures (ascending bubbles and descending snow) move in contrary motion and fuse into airy nothings as each encounters each, reminding us of the way Keats resolved similar fears in an oceanic consciousness of time— —then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink. (p. 366)

—and the manner in which Marvell secured a serene self-extinction in "The Garden" ("Annihilating all that's made / To a green Thought in a green Shade"150). For instead of issuing in "nothingness," life takes on a new and diffused modality as "ever-being"—"[']Are we a groping host / 'Of sleepers, gazing in this twilight gleam, / 'Unconscious dupes of some thought-peopled dream?[']" (p. 45)—a conceit that compounds Berkeley with Plato's parable of the cave: "For, tell me, do you think our prisoners could see anything of themselves or their fellows except as shadows thrown by the fire on the wall of the cave opposite them?"151 The next verse paragraph has Leopold prone beside a body of water, the avatar of Jaques in As You Like It ("he lay along / Under an oak, whose antique root peeps out / Upon the brook that brawls along"—2.1.30-32) and of the poet in Gray's "Elegy" ("His listless length at noontide would he stretch, / And pore upon the brook that babbles by"152). Details from The Anatomy of Melancholy cancel the dynamic refreshment of those brooks, however, and focus on the stagnation from which, according to Burton, the mental disorder springs:

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Chapter Two Standing waters, thick and ill coloured, such as come forth of pools and moats, where hemp hath been steeped, or slimy fishes live, are most unwholesome, putrefied, and full of mites, creepers, slimy, muddy, unclean corrupt, impure, by reason of the sun's heat, and still standing. They cause foul distemperatures in the body and mind of man, are unfit to make drink of, to dress meat with, or to be used about men inwardly or outwardly.153

No less noxious is the "thick, cloudy, misty, foggy air, or such as comes from fens, moorish grounds, lakes, muckhills, draughts, sinks, where any carcasses or carrion lies, or from whence any stinking fulsome smell comes" (1:275)—details that Beddoes turns to atmospheric account: There would he lie, aye, and there was a cave, Hideous and dark, choaked up with thorny weeds, Moss-shrouded, that ne'er cast around their seeds; And the dew lay among them, where it fell, For months and months, and then it 'gan to swell And turned to poison, which they still would wave Inward; where tangled knots of loathsome roots Crept webbed on the roof; the dusk recess Was moistened o'er with drops of clamminess; And, 'mid rank bunches of envenomed shrubs, Glittering with serpents' lathered foam, and grubs Naked and filthy, crawling on the shoots, A stagnant well steamed out dense, stifling mists, Whose brim was silvered with the slimy track Of tardy snails, or toads with mottled back, Which hundred years hatched in the chilly stone. Around the fog-filled cave no wind was blown, Save pantings of huge snakes, bedded in twists Of purple night-shade, and rough hemlock's hair. (pp. 45-46)

The immobile and airless atmosphere looks back to Keats's "Hyperion," whose Titan occupies a shadowy recess in the landscape "Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,"154 and imparts a stasis to the circumambient air: No stir of air was there, Not so much life as on a summer's day Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass, But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest. (p. 221)

Beddoes recapitulates the static listlessness of that vertical descent in weeds that "ne'er cast around their seeds; / And the dew lay among them, where it fell."

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Beyond the figure of Hyperion in the "shady sadness of a vale" we also catch a glimpse of the speaker in Warton's "Pleasures of Melancholy"— Or let me tread Its neighb'ring walk of pines, where mus'd of old The cloyster'd brother: through the gloomy void That far extends beneath their ample arch As on I pace, religious horror wraps my soul In dread repose.155

—and the enforced cloistering of Eloisa in Pope's heroic epistle: Relentless walls! whose darksome round contains Repentant sighs and voluntary pains; Ye rugged rocks! which holy knees have worn; Ye grots and caverns shagg'd with horrid thorn!156

Just as the rebarbative needles and "horrid thorn" are recapitulated in "Leopold" ("choaked up with thorny weeds, / Moss-shrouded") so too are the dark recesses ("gloomy void"; "grots and caverns") as a "cave, / Hideous and dark." Macbeth has yielded the idea of poison distilled through time ("Toad that under cold stone / Days and nights hath thirtyone / Swelter'd venom sleeping got"—4.1.6-8), and serpents and snails, presented as objects of a perverted contemplation, gothicize that way Peter Grimes broods on creatures that fall outside the conventional Augustan idea of to kalon: There anchoring, Peter chose from man to hide, There hang his head, and view the lazy tide In its hot slimy channel slowly glide; Where the small eels that left the deeper way For the warm shore, within the shallows play: Where gaping muscles, left upon the mud, Slope their slow passage to the fallen flood;— Here dull and hopeless he'd lie down and trace How sidelong crabs had scrawl'd their crooked race;157

But whereas Crabbe bases his inventory on scrupulous observation, Beddoes has recourse to bestiary lore, creating unwitting overlaps with the phantasmagorias of Grünewald and Bosch of which he could have had no first-hand knowledge. He obviously knew Pope's Cave of Spleen, however, an invention based on the same tradition that nurtured Bosch (as the reference to "Hermit's Dreams in haunted Shades" makes clear):

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Chapter Two A constant Vapour o'er the Palace flies; Strange Phantoms rising as the Mists arise; Dreadful, as Hermit's Dreams in haunted Shades, Or bright as Visions of expiring Maids. Now glaring Fiends, and Snakes on rolling Spires, Pale Spectres, gaping Tombs, and Purple Fires: (p. 233)

We could read Leopold as Spleen by another name, and, like her, the occupant of "a Grotto, sheltred close from Air, / And screen'd in Shades from Day's detested Glare" (p. 232). Beddoes expunges the satiric element, however, presenting the tableau with the same earnestness that Bosch applies to the temptations of a desert saint. This "convergent evolution" of sensibilities is borne out by what Bussagli says of a painter who had worked centuries before Beddoes: "to decipher these [enigmas], and accurately interpret their ambiguous aspects, would be to put to flight all the shadows oppressing the personality of this extraordinary creator of monsters and fantasies, to throw light on some of the paradoxes of his character, and above all to learn the fears, and possibly the guilt, which form an integral part of it."158 Common to Leopold's cave and the St Jerome at Prayer in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Ghent is the tendency of animal and vegetable to blur into disturbing compounds. Just as the object before the prostrate saint could be a magnified strawberry or a fly or a fusion of both, so the roots on the ceiling of Leopold's cave answer the tangle of snakes below, their webbiness also connecting with the toads beside the pool ("where tangled knots of loathsome roots / Crept webbed on the roof"). Beddoes has recalled the list gothic properties at the start of Keats's "Ode to Melancholy," helping himself to the nightshade, and also finding a new application for the "twist" of "Wolf's-bane" (p. 219) in "twists / Of purple night-shade." He has likewise remembered that Keats heightens our sense of the dark in the "Ode to the Nightingale" by extinguishing and reinstating a source of light: "But here there is no light, / Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown"—p. 208). Beddoes creates the same effect of flickering incertitude in the atmosphere of the grotto: "Around the fog-filled cave no wind was blown, / Save pantings of huge snakes." Since Error in The Faerie Queene lies "vpon the durtie ground," "Her huge long taile . . . in knots and many boughtes vpwound,"159 it would appear that she might lie behind the snakes looped in the nightshade. There is also a thematic purpose behind this enamelled gothic maniera. The quest of Frankenstein led him to murky places—

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Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay? My limbs now tremble, and my eyes swim with the remembrance; but then a resistless, and almost frantic impulse, urged me forward;160

—for, like Faust before him, he yearns to know, "was die Welt / im Innersten zusammenhält"161 ["How secret elements cohere"162]. No surprise, therefore, that serpents should be associated with the mysterious voice that enters Leopold’s consciousness in the cave, as insinuating as the tempter's in Paradise Lost ("It crept into his ears"—p. 46). It addresses him, indeed, as a "human reptile": 'Dost thou, oh human reptile, seek to slake 'Thy thirst of power; to ride along the deep, 'And dally with the lightning, and to sleep 'Under the tempest's wing, robed in the flare 'Of the fierce thunder-bolt? Answer, weak slave.'

(pp. 46-47)

That Beddoes means this to paraphrase the satanic cry "non serviam" can be deduced from the way it recycles images of divinity in Psalm 18: 11. He made darkness his secret place; his pavilion round about him were dark waters and thick clouds of the skies. 12. At the brightness that was before him thick clouds passed, hail stones and coals of fire. 13. The LORD also thundered in the heavens, and the Highest gave his voice; hail stones and coals of fire.

To master the "coherence of secret elements," the initiate must kill his mentor, a development almost certainly suggested by the "brotherhood of Cain" in Manfred, that sodality of transgressors by which the hero asserts his power over "Spirits of earth and air": By the strong curse which is upon my soul, The thought which is within me and around me, I do compel ye to my will—Appear!163

It goes without saying that Leopold leaps at the prospect, and rushes at his victim with the despatch of Virgil's Camilla—as Pope evokes her, at least, in An Essay on Criticism ("when swift Camilla scours the Plain, / Flies o'er the unbending Corn, and skims along the Main"—p. 155):

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Chapter Two And, by some fiend impelled, on Leopold rushed, He scoured along the plain, the streams he passed Breathless, and entered Hubert's cell at last. He entered. The old man was sleeping, prayer Steamed murmured from his lips, a mouldered cross, Which the moon gilt, rose on a mossy boss Behind his pallet, strewn with leafy wreaths. (p. 47)

Anadiplosis ("and entered";"He entered") focuses the irruption and echoes the ritual murder in ritual syntax. Beddoes falls back once more on "The Eve of St Agnes," the steaming of Hubert's prayers like the frosted breath of the beadsman, and the moonlight on his cross like the moonlight on Madeline's pectoral crucifix. The hermit’s reaction seems to hint at pederasty, for how else are we to construe the frequentative implication of "again" and apparently transitive force of please (=pleasure): "'Darling child,' / The old man uttered waking, 'art thou here / Again to please me?'" Since the daemonic voice has already pronounced the murder of the hermit, could this in fact be the "unnamed deed," supplying a human motivation for the supernatural death sentence? The fact that, at the moment of death, the two caverns—Leopold's and Hubert's—converge as places "damp and dark" points to a nexus different from that that usually obtains between foster father and son: With a guilty fear All Leopold's limbs grew stiff; the fading spark Expired and left the cavern damp and dark. And then a spirit blasted in his ear, With syllables of fire, the unnamed deed, The sentence of the hermit.

To render Leopold’s accession to daemonhood, Beddoes fuses Marmion ("'Of middle air the demons proud, / Who ride upon the racking cloud [']"164) with the beatific ascent in Goethe's "Ganymed": The earth all fell Diminishing below him, while he strode Among the winking stars; as there he stayed To taste the torrents that around him played, Athwart his path the steed of tempest passed, Its nostrils foaming with the whirlwind blast; (p. 48)

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But whereas Leopold's consciousness expands and effects the vertiginous disappearance of the earth below him, Goethe's subject had directed his gaze up toward the centre of the universe in a pantheistic "assumption": Ich komm, ich komme! Wohin? Ach, wohin? Hinauf! Hinauf strebts. Es schweben die Wolken Abwärts, die Wolken Neigen sich der sehnenden Liebe. Mir! Mir! In euerm Schosse Aufwärts! Umfangend umfangen! Aufwärts an deinen Busen, Alliebender Vater! [I am coming, coming, Where, ah where? Up, a striving upward. The clouds are floating Down, the clouds Bow to love that is yearning. Take me, take me, Clouds in your lap, Upward, Embraced embracing! Upward to your breast, All-loving father!]165

This conversion of Leopold into a demigod conversant with the stars can be traced to an ode by Horace—"quodsi me lyricis vatibus inseris, / sublimi feriam sidera vertice" [But if you rank me among lyric bards, I shall touch the stars with my exalted head]166—and also parallels a passage in Traherne's Centuries, of which, it goes without saying, Beddoes would have been entirely ignorant: "You never Enjoy the World aright, till the Sea it self floweth in your Veins, till you are Clothed with the Heavens, and Crowned with the stars"167—another instance of "convergent evolution" between two highly developed imaginations. Rendering this expansion of the self with the verb "strode," Beddoes also suggests the deific enlargements of Julius Caesar 1.2.133-34—"he doth bestride the narrow world / Like a Colossus"—and ensures that Leopold, hitherto sullen and disaffected, is properly fitted for his apotheosis. His return to earth registers in terms usually reserved for the

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incarnation. Compare "He issued forth / Upon a mist-winged frost, and came to earth" with "Who for us men, and our salvation, came down from heaven."168 Ritual anadiplosis (disrupted by the parenthetic Section IX)— "and came to earth" / "He came to earth"—brings to mind the ritualism of "I sing of a maiden," for there too the clause "He cam also stille"169 occurs at the start of three consecutive stanzas. In between these repetitions the poet sandwiches an ode to womanhood. As so often with this prescient poet, it looks ahead to the second part of Goethe's Faust, for just as womankind blesses "Our earthly life with looks," and shines "afar / Gilding our night of misery like the star / That beams with hope upon the mariner" (p. 48), so the peroration of Goethe's Chorus Mysticus observes that "das Ewig-Weibliche / zieht uns hinan (p. 449) [Eternal Womanhood / Leads us above] (Wayne, 2:288) The woman who lures Leopold back to earth becomes an unwitting victim of the daemon. In fact, she inverts the plight of Semele, who is also killed by an unmediated experience of divinity. To this end, Beddoes ironically adapts the threefold boast that, according to Suetonius, summarized Caesar's Pontic triumph—"CAME, SAW, CONQUERED!"170: He saw—he saw and loved. Next night again He came, but viewed the beauty racked with pain.

The final section of "Leopold" anticipates developments on the Romantic lyric stage. In the ballet La Sylphide (1832), a Scottish farmer causes the death of a sylph by wanting to possess her, and in Marschner's opera Hans Heiling, an "Erdegeist" falls in love with a mortal woman. On the distant horizon, too, is Matthew Arnold's "Forsaken Merman." The pathos of all these stories derives from the tale of Midas, where a heart's desire has an unforeseen and damaging consequence: "effugere optat opes et quae modo voverat, odit" [he seeks to flee his wealth and hates what he but now has prayed for].171 In "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," we are told that "each man kills the thing he loves,"172 the voluntarism of which seems less terrible than Leopold's killing his beloved simply by virtue of his daemonic love. The only generous impulse of his life turns as deadly as his evil ones. At this point, either because he had begun to lose interest in the project, or because he sensed that a topic so heart-wrenching lay beyond the reach of his adolescent powers, Beddoes resorts to the fragmentary chronicling style of Byron's "Giaour." Its gear-changing ellipses—a sort of narrative aposiopesis—result in bits and pieces that, as Marshall points out, "do not constitute a whole that can be pieced together,"173 while Sundall remarks that they turn the poem from being "a good adventure

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story, interesting primarily for its plot, into the forceful presentation of a mysterious and powerful character whose fate exemplifies humanity's."174 That Beddoes did indeed have "The Giaour" in mind can be deduced from the fact that "Leopold on his dusky charger rears / Himself among the shuddering boughs" (p. 49), while Byron's hero comes "thundering . . . on blackest steed" (p. 254). The fragmentary "remains" of "Leopold" manage, in spite (or even because) of their breakage, to hint a grief so vast that it comes to a dizzy climax: Far, far below the fathomless abyss Of the deep waters. With a searing hiss The enemies moved on. Then Leopold sent A roar of horror up into the sky, While the sea foamed upon his feeble cry. (p. 50)

One can't help wondering if Tennyson, equivocal admirer of Beddoes, recalled this moment in "The Kraken." For there too a monster, sleeps "Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea," Until the latter fire shall heat the deep; Then once by man and angels to be seen, In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.175

John Agar suggests that despair, "which renders his power meaningless," is "the price that Leopold ultimately must pay for that power,"176 thus discounting the price of dehumanization that he paid by murdering Hubert. But it seems to me that the paradox of the tale centres rather on the persistence of love in a man who has chosen a destiny of lovelessness. Reviewing Scott's "Lay of the Last Minstrel" in 1805, Francis Jeffrey saluted it as an attempt at "adapting to the taste of modern readers a species of poetry which was once the delight of the courtly, but has long ceased to gladden any other eyes than those of the scholar and the antiquary".177 Such adaptations, he went on to remark, enrich the form with "the improvements which every branch of literature has received since the time of its desertion" (p. 8n.), including a capacity "to heighten the effect of the picture which he presents to the eye" (p. 14.n.) "The Improvisatore" invites similar praise, its occasional crudities and misjudgements notwithstanding. Lytton Strachey claimed that "the boy, with his elaborate exhibitions of physical horror, was doing his best to make his readers' flesh creep,"178 but so did the adult Beddoes, if we bear in mind that in Death's Jest-Book the "anatomical imagery of dismembered limbs, cold and cadaverous or rife with gore, evokes with horrible emphasis the cruel brutality both in the oppression of tyrants and

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in the power-struggle of revolutionaries."179 Nor should we disregard the element of self-mockery that attends his gleeful exploration of the macabre, for, as Charles Hoyt remarks, to take "these over-fed gore-crows, vultures and serpents . . . too seriously is . . . to rob Beddoes of his fun. There is fully as much Hallowe'en mummery in The Improvisatore as there is neurosis."180 The poet's mature verse is anticipated also in its emblematic tableaux and paysages moralisés, evidence of a life-long fascination with the borderlines of genre: Four years earlier, shortly before he was forced to leave Bavaria, Beddoes submitted "Périer" to Bayerisches Volksblatt (14 Feb. 1832). In this brief satire Beddoes describes how he would go about sketching an "allegorische Tableau" of the French political scene. . . . In the middle he would depict Casimir Périer as a bat sitting in a half-darkened crevice. Encircling the figure of the bat, says Beddoes, would be snarling fourfooted beasts below and screeching birds of prey above. The bat itself, "der vierfüsige Vogel und der geflügelte Vierfüssler", would be shown as cowering in his crevice.181

Nor did Beddoes's own adult conduct differ much from the sullen disaffection of Rodolph and Leopold: "[w]ährend seiner Studienzeit in Göttingen hatte er anscheinend die romantische Rolle des an 'Weltschmerz' leidenden Melancholikers gespielt" [during his student days in Göttingen he apparently played the Romantic part of the melancholic who suffers from a cosmic grief].182 The discontinuity between this astonishing first effort and the later verse is by no means as sharp as commentators have suggested. That its "excesses" were in fact congenital (and therefore indivorcible from the very nature of Beddoes's gift) can be deduced from the finding of a contemporary review, which regretted the tendency of the characters in The Bride's Tragedy to "declaim, harangue, spout and poeticise with equal ease and elegance; when they go mad, which . . . they almost all do . . . they merely become a little more figurate and metaphorical."183 In other words, the critic felt it suffered from a lack of textural differentiation, both of character from character, and of sane from disordered discourse. Even in "The Improvisatore," a poem that offers diverse narratives in diverse metrical forms, one is conscious of the obsessive manipulation of a limited range of tropes, and of a rich but unvarying style. Overreaching, as Coxe points out, had been there ab origine: Excess, calculated or at times merely chaotic, crowds into action, structure and metaphor. It is in this respect above all that Beddoes is a poet worthy of our attention, for he did not fear a risk, in particular that most dangerous

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of all risks: being caught out in a generalization or a cliché. And perhaps because he was remote from his contemporaries, because he was unafraid of traditional, stock situations, his best dramatic verse is exciting, in language, metaphor, and movement.184

Macaulay's once complained of Southey "that he is by no means so skilful in designing as in filling up"185—a judgement that applies no less to Beddoes, most especially in these adolescent narratives. But we still need to study them not only for the sake of their own considerable merits but also because, as Frederick Pierce observes, "careful students of Beddoes' early verse. . . feel in his final masterpiece the logical maturing of tendencies latent in boyhood."186

CHAPTER THREE MISCELLANEOUS POEMS

The contents of this chapter encompass all the lyric make-weights that appeared alongside "The Improvisatore" in Beddoes's first collection, from the (possibly) lamentable "Comet" to the excellent "Bunch of Grapes." The quatorzains sandwiched between them have generally been ignored by commentators on the poet, and deserve a more generous assessment and more extensive explication than they have hitherto been accorded.

“The Comet" (p. 51) Although published with "The Improvisatore," this properly belongs with "Juvenilia," and is, without question, Beddoes's least distinguished effort—worse, certainly, than the Hymn from Scaroni, the only other poem undoubtedly written before "The Improvisatore." R. W. Donner probably speaks for most in finding "the whole thing . . . childish."1 Published on 5 July, 1819, it allows us to plot Beddoes's remarkable progress as a poet in the course of the next two years—unless, of course, he meant "The Comet" as a spoof. So poor is the quality of the verse (and so atypical the sentiments) that one suspects it might have been conceived as an anti-Anti-Jacobin exercise. Beddoes was a fractious schoolboy and the son, moreover, of a celebrated Radical who had outraged Oxford with his revolutionary sympathies. That he subscribed to his father's values (even though he was only five at the time of his death) can be deduced not only from the political convictions of his adulthood but also from the motto he adopted at the Charterhouse: Manus haec inimica tyrannis (Donner, p. 59). In July of 1819, England, a member of the "Holy Alliance," was still in the grip of the post-Napoleonic reaction. Peterloo was only a month away, and Shelley's bitter anatomy of the country ("An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king"2) a further six. Could the precocious Beddoes, a devotee of Shelley and armed with his own Radical credentials, seriously have advanced his country's as an ideal society, and turned churches and almshouses into metonyms of blessedness? I think that unlikely. He would more probably have mocked right-wing values in

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the same way that Canning had mocked his left-wing adversaries at the end of the eighteenth century, and done so by mimicking the AntiJacobin's "Sainte Guillotine." This poem, also written in crudely pounding anapaests, argues that a fifth column of progressives has rendered England vulnerable to revolution: From the blood-bedewed vallies and mountains of France, See the Genius of Gallic INVASION advance! Old Ocean shall waft her, unruffled by storm, While our shores are all lined with the "Friends of Reform".1

"La Sainte Guillotine" was in turn a quasi-parody of William Roscoe, one such "Friend of Reform": On the vine-covered hills and gay regions of France, See the day-star of liberty rise, Through the clouds of detraction unsullied advance, And hold its new course through the skies. (p. 31)

As Shelley in his 1819 sonnet ("from which a glorious Phantom may / Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day"—p. 613), Roscoe signalized the events in France with an aerial portent. His opening line supplied Canning's parody with its point of departure, but after that the parallels fall away. Indeed, even the verse forms diverge, Canning having dispensed with the interleaved trimeters. If I am right in reading Beddoes's "Comet" as a spoof, he has parodied Canning's own parody in turn. Since the latter implicitly declares himself the "Enemy of Reform," we can infer that he thought England stood in no need of change, a sentiment that might have gone down well during a nox ambrosiana, but certainly not in the Beddoes household. One is forced to speculate, therefore, that "The Comet" mocks its predecessor's right-wing complacency. "The Improvisatore," moreover, written at about the same time, is metrically and rhythmically more subtle than its coarse, "martellato" anapaests—"hard, metallic, and unvaried"4: The eye of the demon on ALBION was turned, And, viewing the happy, with envy he burned; He snarled at the churches, the almshouse he cursed, Till hate of their virtue his silence had burst: 'Why waves yonder harvest? why glitters yon tower? 'My hate they despise, and they scoff at my power.5

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Canning had presented France as a desolate battlefield; Beddoes, using the statesman's ventriloquial persona, focuses instead on English fields of wheat (to hint, perhaps, at the injustice of the Corn Laws). And just as in the Anti-Jacobin original a "Gallic Invasion" promised to level the English landscape both literally and figuratively—"See the level of Freedom sweeps over the land— / The vile Aristocracy's doom is at hand!" (p. 30)—so, by contrast, "The Comet" begins with churches, their towers intact and vertical. A faint echo of Medea's invocation (Book VII of the Metamorphoses) can be heard in its summoning of the elements, but when they reply by kind, the adversative clauses create a more mechanical structure than those which Beddoes favoured in his later verse. Although "The Comet" suffers from the unremitting beat of its trisyllabic feet, there is one fine effect of slancio when consecutive strong stresses are strung together ("Attend to my call, air, earth, water and fire") and the stress seems momentarily to falter and fall through space. Another hint of Beddoes's satiric purpose can be found in the blustery climax—"But while virtue and justice in Britain remain, / The fire-brand of Yamen shall dazzle in vain." Offering a superstitious account of comets that ignores the demythologization begun by Brahe and completed by Halley, it suggests the ignorance and regressiveness of reaction, as deliberately anti-intellectual as the claim that the "virtue and justice" of an unreformed England will stave off disaster. We can either read "The Comet" as the crude effusion of a patriotic schoolboy or an impudently deadpan mocking of "Legitimacy." That doesn't improve its quality, of course, but at least the poet emerges from the artistic failure with moral credit in hand.

Quatorzains Beddoes's most characteristic verse turns on steep contrasts of matter. But whereas in "The Improvisatore" he modulates with next to no preparation from lyrical interludes to moments of horror (and relishes the suddenness of the attendant discords), his "Quatorzains" are marked by unity of tone. Most commentators ignore or disparage them, but they strike me as being fairly distinguished efforts. On some occasions, indeed, on the occasions when they look ahead to the "paneaux decoratifs" of fin de siècle verse, they even seem original. Only in such poems as Oscar Wilde's tableaux à la Whistler do we encounter comparable "tone poems" that try to unmoor language from rational and consecutive habits of thought. Consider, for example, the "Symphony in Yellow," which links its data by a contingent colour harmony, the sole "justification" of the poem:

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An omnibus across the bridge Crawls like a yellow butterfly, And here and there, a passer-by Shows like a little restless midge. Big barges full of yellow hay Are moored against the shadowy wharf, And, like a yellow silken scarf, The thick fog hangs along the quay.6

And consider also the "evocations poétiques" of Joyce, verbal constructs made on the same Impressionist terms as Wilde's, and offering harmonic texture in lieu of logic: The twilight turns from amethyst To deep and deeper blue, The lamp fills with a pale green glow The trees of the avenue. The old piano plays an air, Sedate and slow and gay; She bends upon the yellow keys, The head inclines this way.7

This purely decorative poetry, adducing sensations in a painterly morceau, can be traced back to the French Parnassians, some of whose attitudes and assumptions Beddoes can be said to have foreshadowed in the "Quatorzains." While he himself provided no manifesto for the halfderanged, half-logical handling of his image trains, they find an echo in the non-linguistic imperatives of Gautier's "L'Art": Sculpte, lime, cisèle; Que ton rêve flottant Se scelle Dans le bloc résistant!8

Many critics have saluted Beddoes's highly developed ear (Iain Bamforth remarks that "Dream-Pedlary" has "been praised for its exquisite music by the two polar princes of American poetry"9), but less attention has been devoted to the equally fine attunements of his eye. The quatorzains represent what may be termed a plastification of the lyric (as opposed to its more traditional alignment with sound values). Cecil Day Lewis points out that a dominance of "verbal music" will lead to "pure poetry," and that "this development of the lyric brings us on one hand to

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the nonsense poetry of Lear, on the other to the poetry of Mallarmé which, as Dr. Elizabeth Sewell has said, 'is so pure that it is about poetry and nothing else at all, a form commenting on a form, the content irrelevant.'"10 We should not forget, however, that any loosening in the bonds of logic can have visual as well as aural consequences, and that in a poetic "panneau décoratif," the emphasis falls chiefly on graphic and plastic effects. This is not to deny that Beddoes's quatorzains lack melody, but rather to stress that they centre on accumulating and arranging visual data. Daniel Karlin remarks of "A Rivulet" that the poet, uninterested in "conventional description," focuses on "the 'lovely stream' of language," 11 but there can still be no denying that "conventional description"— recteunconventional—remains the paramount purpose behind the utterance. By the same token, Gautier's ode "A une robe rose," while unquestionably musical, is more concerned with its repeated similaic passes at the subject in hand: Frêle comme une aile d'abeille, Frais comme un coeur de rose-thé, Son tissu, caresse vermeille, Voltige autour de ta beauté. (p. 133)

This applies the Elizabethan effictio (blazon) to a garment, offering an inventory of flat, decorative notations. Similar kinds of flattening occur in the work of some nineteenth-century painters. Odilon Redon called one of his compositions Panneau décoratif (1902), and Bonnard followed him with Le Plaisir: Panneau décoratif ou Les Jeux. Commenting on the pictures of Ludwig von Hofmann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal noted their saturation of space for its own sake (a function of pattern rather than mimesis), and likened it to the "abstract" figuration of a Mozart sonata: Their unity is in the rhythmical joy which they emanate and which the soul is so ready to absorb through the eye as well as through the ear. These figures narrate nothing but their nakedness; they fill the picture area rhythmically and the power of the imagination can play them through to the end, page for page, and weigh itself on them, as on any series of blissful tones.12

This bears comparison with Whistler's attempt to drain painting of reference: Art should be independent of clap-trap—should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear without confounding this emotions entirely

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foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it; and that is why I insist on calling my works "arrangements" and "harmonies".13

He could as aptly have called them "panneaux décoratifs," a term also applicable to Beddoes's quatorzains. By choosing to centre his formal tag on a mere line count, he avoided the thematic and historical baggage that "sonnet" would have brought with it—the tradition of argumentation, of moving from one argumentative stance to another. Some sonnets, admittedly, have indeed been deployed as instruments of pure description—the effictiones of Thomas Watson and Spenser itemize the beloved's charms point by point—but even those have an ulterior theme of celebration, and the data aren't adduced merely for the sake of the pattern they create. Sonnets generally favour dynamic, heuristic verse above pictorial contemplation, and the latter activity is better rendered through a "quatorzain," its fourteen lines a tabula rasa upon which the poet can inscribe his descriptive gestures at will. Choosing to use his format in this manner, Beddoes might be said to have approximated Schlegel's idea of the naive, poising his poems on the cusp of premeditation and instinct, and hinting the sonnet Gestalt so as to ironize the expectations that necessarily attend it: Naiv ist, was bis zur Ironie oder bis zum steten Wechsel von Selbstschöpfung und Selbstvernichtung natürlich, individuell oder klassisch ist oder scheint. Ist es bloss Instinkt, so ists kindlich, kindisch oder albern; ists bloss Absicht, so ensteht Affektation. Das schöne, poetische, idealische Naive muss zugleich Absicht und Instinkt sein.14 [The naive is that which, on the threshold of irony, or on the brink of continued alternation between self-assertion and self-immolation, either actually or apparently registers as something natural, whether individuated or classical. If it is purely instinctual, it becomes childlike, childish or foolish; if purely purposive, it issues in affectation. The beautiful, poetic, ideal naive must compound both premeditation and instinct.]

Beddoes's conception of the sonnet, half adapted to the panneau décoratif, occupies that middle ground between child-likeness and affectation.

I "To Perfume" (p. 52) This is the first several fourteen-liners devoted to topics so abstract that they perpetually challenge (and evade) the material metaphors the poet

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despatches to capture them. Indeed, they could be viewed as Schlegelian instinct in search of premeditation. Images keep mounting up around an intangible centre, and, when that centre evaporates, leave a decorative residuum behind. Wilde's "Symphony in Yellow" begins ostensibly as a cityscape, but resolves in the last resort into self-referential blocks of colour and texture. Similarly, Klimt's Kiss, far from realizing the erotic energy of the title, enshrouds two modelled human faces in an unmodelled collage of fabric. Both projects reduce themselves to a decorated surface, and just such a surface—and a surface quite as highly wrought—results from Beddoes's attempt to render perfume into words. He begins by presenting it as the elusive participant in a masquerade: Exquisite masquer, who dost changeful flit Upon the sun-hatched zephyr, basking now In the broad light, 'mongst the roses thou dost sit On crimson throne in the thorn-guarded bough, Veiled by pink curtains, which will scarce admit To thine embrace the bee with velvet brow; (p. 52)

While "masquer" is the matrix image (viz, a festive play with identity), its "accidents" point us in several different directions. Our first thought is of butterflies, and we assume that perfume "flits" changefully not only because it moves at whim from flower to flower but also because it gives us alternating views of inner and outer wings. Butterflies are also ontologically "changeful," having metamorphosed twice over in course of their lives, a line of thought underscored by "sun-hatched zephyr," where "hatch" evokes an insect brought to life by summer warmth. Here the poet has gone to school on Shelley's method of evocation, for he is also prone to images that try to encapsulate elusive tenors, and which "hatch" new associations in the process. Consider the first stanza of the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty": The awful shadow of some unseen Power Floats though unseen among us,—visiting This various world with as inconstant wing As summer winds that creep from flower to flower,— Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower, It visits with inconstant glance Each human heart and countenance; Like hues and harmonies of evening,— Like clouds in starlight widely spread,— Like memory of music, fled— Like aught that for its grace may be Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery. (p. 569)

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The "unseen power," as intangible as Beddoes's perfume, keeps slipping away from the poet's attempts at capsulation until, despairing of its ineffability, he invites his readers to fashion their own versions of the Rorschach Blot he has put at their disposal: "Like aught that for its grace may be / Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery." Notwithstanding its systematic accumulation of sensuous data, however, the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" is not a panneau décoratif; the data remain subsidiary to a theme, and don't configure in a self-sufficient pattern. Shelley's procedure is too loose, vaporous and unconsecutive to produce an integrated visual surface, and he "deletes" each simile once it's made its partial contribution to the topic in hand. "To Perfume" achieves a different effect, notwithstanding the fact that Beddoes, like his master, perpetually re-shells his tenor in different vehicles. Another Shelley-like habit can be observed in the liminal weaving of the concrete and the abstract. The first stanza of "Mont Blanc" characterizes the "everlasting universe of things" in terms of a specific topography: The everlasting universe of things Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves, Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom— Now lending splendour, where from secret springs The source of human thought its tribute brings Of waters . . . (p. 571)

But by the time we encounter the actual river, it has all but lost its haecceity to the abstraction it serves: Thus thou, Ravine of Arve—dark, deep Ravine— Thou many-coloured, many voicèd vale, Over whose pines, and crags, and caverns sail Fast cloud-shadows and sunbeams: awful scene, Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down From ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne, (p. 571)

Something of the same commerce between the tangible and intangible can be observed in "To Perfume," but, since the visual element is more vividly accentuated, Beddoes has compounded Shelley with Keats, or—to put it differently—created a Shelley in which every rift has been loaded with ore. Compare the comparatively "nude" evocation of "summer winds that creep from flower to / flower" in the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" with Beddoes's "sun-hatched zephyr," "crimson throne" and "pink curtains,"

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and there can be no doubt as to which poet has the more sensuous imagination. Whereas Shelley sacrifices tangibility to the transient inter-melting of images, Beddoes creates a tableau along the lines of "La Belle au bois dormant": "'mongst the roses thou dost sit / On crimson throne in the thorn-guarded bough." Lightly evoked images permit of fluent modulation, but Beddoes, having created something tangible and vivid—a thorny sanctum almost impervious to bees—must "forcibly" replace perfume-as-butterfly with perfume-as-flower. This comes at the cost of confusion, for the mind's eye, having latched on to the concrete data, is reluctant to release them, and ties itself up in the impossible task of finding coherence in the poet's incoherent programme of changefulness. Having (somewhat improbably) fixed perfume on a bough, he then heaps on accidental textures—the velvet of bees and implicit silk of curtains— forgetting that the tenor at the heart of the image is actually intangible: . . . thou dost sit On crimson throne in the thorn-guarded bough, Veiled by pink curtains, which will scarce admit To thine embrace the bee with velvet brow;

(One can remark in passing the subliminal echo here of Shelley's ode "To a Skylark": Like a rose embowered In its own green leaves, By warm winds deflowered, Till the scent it gives Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-wingéd thieves. [p. 64])

Beddoes then changes course once more, starting a new line of thought with the first of several separative conjunctions: Or winged as incense, rising to the sun, A dove-like messenger thou bearest the prayer; Or dost alight where streamlets gently run, Gliding in dew adown the morning air;

These syntactic hinges are crucial in creating a "what-you-will" atmosphere of improvisation, and seem to derive from Keats's ode "To Autumn": Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep, Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

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Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers: And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep Steady thy laden head across a brook; Or by a cyder-press, with patient look, Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.15

Although Keats successively incarnates Autumn in avatars of the season, he lets her retain the Gestalt of a female divinity. Beddoes's transitions are more capricious, recalling that pattern of instatement and commutation— like the successive slides of a magic lantern—in Shelley's "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty": Thy light alone—like mist o'er mountains driven, Or music by the night-wind sent Through strings of some still instrument, Or moonlight on a midnight stream, Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream. (p. 570)

But whereas Shelley's similes link together through the common denominators of transience and nocturnality, the "or" conjunctions in "To Perfume" introduce radical shifts of perspective, and take us from the tableau of sunwarmed, bee-swarmed roses to a pagan rite at dawn—or if not to an actual ceremony, then at least to a vision of mist rising from the odorous earth: "Or winged as incense, rising to the sun, / A dove-like messenger thou bearest the prayer." While this incense image owes something to Keats's Hellenism ("while upswelling, / The incense went to her own starry dwelling"—p. 8), Beddoes adds further nuances—a hint of the dove in Renaissance Annunciations and the returning dove of the Noah myth. These parallels can't be driven home, however, for incense fumes, languorous and curling, evoke serpents more readily than they do birds. Beddoes repeats the effect of intangible, half-glimpsed data at the next stage of his image-enfilade. Here he reverses the rising incense with the "descent" of the dew, and allows these antithetical prepositions to work in contrary motion. He suggests that perfume has distilled into drops of dew, and that these slide across an atmosphere so thick that they travel "down" rather than through the medium. One recalls in this regard the bands of opaque vapour that Hokusai draws across some of his landscapes (though Beddoes would have been familiar only with chinoiserie approximations of the effect). Notwithstanding the claim in Job 14.9—"Yet through the scent of water it will bud"—one's common-sense experience of the element insists on its being odourless. But so much does Beddoes delight in tracing the oppositional rhythms of his tableau that he forgets the crucial fact that his subject is perfume.

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Certainly he seems to have confused scent with airiness in the terminal image. Why perfume should have body enough to prise apart lips, and why those lips should supply fragrance rather than taste to the male explorer are questions too literal to be forced upon a poem in which visual logic has triumphed over verbal. There is an attractive irresoluteness about its metaphoric half-close, however, an irresoluteness all the more apparent for being lodged at the point where a clarifying couplet would more usually occur: Dividing as a kiss the ruby pair, Which the coquetting night-wind only sips; Stay till I fetch thee from those mellow lips.

Before identifying the lips for what they are, Beddoes makes them the subject of a riddle. The "ruby pair" momentarily recalls the rose's "crimson throne" before we realize that a person has now entered the quatorzain, another half-embodiment of the essence it has set out to explore.

II "Thoughts" (p. 52) Like its predecessor, this poem reveals a debt to Keats, not least in the phrasing of its first line ("Sweet are the thoughts that haunt the poet's brain"), which recalls the verse epistle "To George Felton Mathew": "Sweet are the pleasures that to verse belong, / And doubly sweet a brotherhood in song" (p. 23). Like that poem, it tries to capture the ineffable through concrete images that necessarily fail in their task, and which remain on the page as decorative shells after their elusive essence has escaped them. The result is a sleight of hand that pretends only to compare thoughts to physical objects, all the while converting simile to substance and creating a de facto record of the way in which the imagination works: Sweet are the thoughts that haunt the poet's brain Like rainbow-fringed clouds, through which some star Peeps in bright glory on a shepherd swain; They sweep along and trance him; sweeter far Than incense trailing up an out-stretched chain From rocking censer; sweeter too they are Than the thin mist which rises in the gale From out the slender cowslip's bee-scarred breast.(p. 52)

The open-ended distributive ("some") allows Beddoes loosely to call the moon a "star," and so to recall a vignette in "I Stood Tip-Toe"—

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He was a Poet, sure a lover too, Who stood on Latmus' top, what time there blew Soft breezes from the myrtle vale below; And brought in faintness solemn, sweet, and slow A hymn from Dian's temple; while upswelling, The incense went to her own starry dwelling. But though her face was clear as infant's eyes, Though she stood smiling o'er the sacrifice, The Poet wept at her so piteous fate, Wept that such beauty should be desolate: So in fine wrath some golden sounds he won, And gave meek Cynthia her Endymion. (p. 8)

—and the swiftly moving cloud and entranced spectator have their provenance in Shelley's "Mont Blanc" ("I seem as in a trance sublime and strange"; "Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep"—p. 572). Keats has also inspired the tactic of comparative intensification, for just as "Sleep and Poetry" moves from known images to an "unknown" subject— "What is more gentle than the wind in summer? / What is more soothing than the pretty hummer" (p. 42)—so Beddoes, reversing course, indicates the increasing distance between his ineffable thoughts and the similes that try to register them ("sweeter far / Than incense trailing up an outstretched chain / From rocking censer; sweeter too they are"). The "unsuitable" artifice of the censer seems to lie behind the protesting comparative ("sweeter far"), but the natural cowslip proves no more adequate to the task in hand ("sweeter too they are"). The poem remains a decorative artefact, and Beddoes laces his picture with linear parallels, the pendular thurible duplicated in the swaying of flowers, and the ascending vapour matched by ascending incense, even though the phrases "thin mist" and "rises in the gale" lack logical compatibility. Contradictions of this kind often occur in the quatorzains. In the next, for example, "A Rivulet," we learn that "billows hurl / Their sparkles in her lap" (pp. 52-53), Karlin claiming that the "exigencies of rhyme have forced Beddoes to give 'hurl' an inept prominence" (p. 39). As I see it, however, the enjambement rather than the rhyme accounts for that sforzando of energy, an energy perfectly compatible with the noun "billows." Objections, if they were to be lodged, should relate rather to the fact that hurling billows aren't an attribute of rivulets. All things are relative, however, and the "fairy eyes" that now enter the poem no doubt magnify the ripples in the same way that Gulliver magnifies the nipples of Brobdingnag. Beddoes introduces a further contradictory note in the cowslip scars. These "lesions" suggest the violence of the scrabbling bees, very different in effect from the jewelled nodes in A Midsummer Night's

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Dream 2.1.12 ("Those be rubies, fairy favours, / In those freckles live their savours"). Not for nothing does Greg Crossan include "bee-scarred breast" in his inventory of phrases containing "an element of surprise."16 Having gestured toward the inexpressibility of the thoughts beyond the range of "sweet" and "sweeter," Beddoes now gives them wings, dwelling at length on the data imported both by the metaphor and the simile compounded with it: Their delicate pinions buoy up a tale Like brittle wings, which curtain in the vest Of cobweb-limbed ephemerae, that sail In gauzy mantle of dun twilight dressed, Borne on the wind's soft sighings, when the spring Listens all evening to its whispering.

One might wonder if thoughts can properly be envisioned as the wings of tales, and if wings so "delicate" and "brittle" be adequate to their task—but to wonder along these lines is once again to ignore the primacy here of a decorative impulse. Caught up in the texture and colour of the vehicle, Beddoes all but forgets his tenor, for his attention has been deflected to a mayfly, presented in a paradoxical state of repose ("curtain in the vest") even as it bests the evening wind. The trailing legs of the insect subliminally evoke spiders and webs, and these surface logically enough in "gauzy." Just as Queen Mab fashions collars from "the moonshine's watery beams" (Romeo and Juliet 1.4.65), so Beddoes crafts these wings from "dun twilight," which cues the crepuscular note of the ending. He must have been thinking of the ode "To Autumn" at this point— Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; (Keats, p. 219)

—and the description of the mayfly wings, carrying the pendicle of another—"that sail / In gauzy mantle"—recalls the strung-along clauses in "The House that Jack Built." It's not entirely clear if the "spring" of the couplet is the season or a fountain. The suggestion of the watery kind is strengthened by the precedents in Keats ("Autumn's" sallows locate the gnats near water) and Collins (the "Ode to Evening" associates the "small but sullen" horn of a beetle with "springs and dying gales"17), but both meanings are tenable, and point once again to the poem's loose

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impressionism. So too does the contradiction between "sighings" (nonverbal ventings) and "whispering" (purposeful communication).

III "A Rivulet" (p. 53) Our sense of the quatorzains as decorative panels is intensified by the ecphrastic phrasing of the first line of this poem, which has the air of a gallery label. In many poems, the "It is an x" formula usually issues in a temporal complement—Wordsworth's "It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,"18 for example, and "It was an April morning: fresh and clear" (p. 116)—and this in turn moves from static description toward dynamic narrative. Noun complements are rarer, by contrast, and more often prompt rooting explications. Herbert's "Church-floore"—"that square & speckled stone, / Which looks so firm and strong, / Is Patience."19—is a case in point, and so is "A Rivulet," which passes over the causal relation (if any) between the waves and wind, and draws attention to the spatial rhythms that obtain in the scene to hand: It is a lovely stream: its wavelets purl As if they echoed to the fall and rise Of the capricious breeze; each upward curl, That splashes pearl, mirrors the fairy eyes Of viewless passer, and the billows hurl Their sparkles on her lap, as o'er she flies. (pp. 52-53)

Beddoes enacts the capriciousness of the breeze by inverting the more usual doublet ("rise and fall") as "fall and rise," and also through the "curls" of water—data that can't be detected by a prosaic eye, though Leondardo's managed to catch them, his streams and deluges being amongst the most direct expressions of his sense of form, springing from the same mysterious source of his love of knots and tendrils. A sheet at Windsor shows water taking the form of both hair and flowers, racing along in twisted strands, and pouring from a sluice so that it makes dozens of little whirlpools, like a cluster of ferns with long curling tendrils.20

Curls of water also figure in Hokusai's pictures, an effect more calligraphic than mimetic. Indeed many oriental landscapes involve cun— "special brush-strokes used in representing rocks and trees"21—which technique stylizes its subjects instead of transcribing them. But there are western as well as eastern influences at work in the quatorzain. The "capricious" breeze recalls the capriccios of Guardi, essentially fantasies, notwithstanding their concern with "quasi-

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topographical subjects and VEDUTE."22 Beddoes's is also a capriccio of sorts—a verbal picture spun from the imagination and only incidentally concerned with the data of an English scene. This aesthetic is revealed in the "splashes of pearl," physically improbable in nature, but easily understood as the nacreous inlay of a panneau décoratif, (sunlight on water issues in glitter rather than a delicate sheen). The poem's percepts are ostensibly vectored by the "fairy eyes / Of viewless passer," and even though the idea of viewlessness doesn't jibe with that of reflection, it's impertinent to adduce such logical objections against the tenets of an essentially decorative art. This, while it might flirt with mimesis, will always privilege patterned arabesque above actuality. One should also bear in mind that while some ceramics are embellished with "deutsche Blumen," naturalistic and botanically exact, many more flaunt their stylized antitypes—the so-called "indianische Blumen." All the creative energy of the quatorzain centres on linear design rather than scrupulous transcription—an emphasis as ancient as the entrelacement of Anglo-Saxon art: The great stone crosses of Northumberland and Cumberland, hewn in the early eighth century, are carved with abstract interlaced patterns in which bands or threads or vines turn back upon themselves to form woven intersections or knots. They may be symbols of eternity, like the spirals upon even more ancient stone, but they seem also to display a delight in intricacy or ornament for its own sake.23

Most landscapes contain staffage, figures and animals that "animate a picture intended essentially as a landscape or veduta" (Linda and Peter Murray, p. 404), and which also create a sense of scale. The "viewless passer" in "A Rivulet" is such a figure, realized on the lyric canvas even as she evades detection. She must be flying on her back since her lap receives the sparkles, poet no doubt having drawn inspiration from the putti flying belly up in Poussin's Triumph of Amphitrite and Watteau's Departure for Cytherea—or other pictures using the same convention. Directing our attention at the dynamic elements at play within the static tableau, Beddoes steps up the momentum: And see, where onward whirls, within a ring, Of smoothest dimples, a dark fox-glove bell Half stifled by the gush encircling; Perchance some tiny sprite crawled to that shell To sleep away the noon, and winds did swing Him into rest; for the warm sun was well Shaded off by the long and silky down;

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So I will save it, lest the elf should drown.

Daniel Karlin gives a good account of the semantic and metrical cross currents here—"'encircling' supposedly rhymes with 'ring' but circles back to 'whirls', and draws attention to itself by missing a beat in the iambic line" (p. 39)—except that the connection between "ring" and "encircling" isn't overridden by that between "whirls" and "encircling": they cooperate with each other. Nor is there a missing beat. Many pentameters evade catalexis by elastically adapting to the right count, and, since Shakespeare sometimes expands apparently intractable monosyllables into two beats, we should allow Beddoes the same licence, and attach a schwa to the L of "encircling." That provides the full complement of ictus. Having used the eyes of the viewless passer to magnify wavelets into "billows," Beddoes resorts to further "fairy writing," allowing a sprite to fly in from Collins's "Ode to Evening" ("fragrant Hours, and elves / Who slept in flowers the day"—p. 465) or fromThe Tempest—"Where the bee sucks, there suck I: / In a cowslip's bell I lie" (1.5)—proof, if proof were needed, of the "pleasure of English writers [take] in creating fantastic miniature worlds."24 Beddoes's empathy is apparent from the way he projects himself into the darkness of the flower bell, the warmth of the sun outside, and the relief of the shadow within. Since foxgloves are smooth in texture, "down" must be an adverbial adjective, stressing the pendant fall of the flower as it rocks the elf to sleep.

IV "To Sound" (p. 53) This quatorzain and its successor present a diptych hinged by the common topic (whereas a later doublet—"A Clock Striking at Midnight"—is syntactically enjambed. Beddoes has gone to school on the odic prayers of Sensibility. Collins's "Ode to Fear," for example, invokes its subject and then surrounds it with "shadowy shapes": Thou, whom the world unknown, With all its shadowy shapes is shown; Who see'st appalled the unreal scene, While Fancy lifts the veil between: (p. 418)

Beddoes's vocative likewise summons up sound, and then alerts us to the "shadowy shape"—"silence"—alongside it: Spirit, who stealest from silence's embrace, Lending to mortal thoughts a powerful wing;

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After that the poems diverge, for Collins moves from adoration to intercession ("Teach me but once to feel like him"—p. 423) whereas Beddoes defers his petition to the second quatorzain, the first being devoted to a nonce litany of descriptive clauses. "Stealing" suggests the furtive way in which sound eludes the embrace of silence, a theft of meaning from unmeaning soundlessness. For just as Prometheus' stolen fire enhanced the lot of humankind, so does sound enrich our lives with thoughts that would otherwise remain incommunicable—"delectable shapes, which delivered o'er to the voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit" (2Henry IV 4.3.98100). Because sound lends "to mortal thoughts a powerful wing," it becomes a metonym for the spoken word. Clearly Beddoes has remembered the antapodosis (multivalent comparison) in "The Progress of Poesy," through which Gray offers spaced temporal adverbs ("Now . . . Now") to establish consecutive connections between each stage of his metaphor and its shifting tenor: Now the rich stream of music winds along, Deep, majestic, smooth and strong, Through verdant vales and Ceres' golden reign, Now rolling down the steep amain, Headlong, impetuous, see it roar.25

Beddoes uses the same adverb in the same way, mapping out a discourse that keeps changing in strength and sonority: "Now marching slow . . . Now gambolling." The capricious "unimaginability" of the conceits is a function of his attempt to embody something bodiless. "Marching" has a regulated movement at odds with "broken cries," and the aural matrix of "syllabling" is hard to reconcile with the visual one of "gambolling." Even more problematic is the way the ladies' voices contain sound within themselves, a claim that effectively teases us out of thought. Nor does the epistemological elusiveness stop there; the sestet both invites and repels visualization, and elaborates the vehicle even though the tenor has flown: How thou dost prison up in lovely wreaths, The hearer's soul, like buds, whose folded leaves Conceal their lusciousness in rosy sheathes.

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How, when some hapless beauty, sighing, grieves, Though barbest every arrowed sigh she breathes, And givest a sting to sobs she quickly heaves;

Beddoes duplicates the symmetrical spacing of the temporal adverbs ("now") in the spacing of the modal ("how"), but this formal clarity is unable to prevent the images from slipping and sliding. Plural "buds" don't jibe comfortably with the singular "soul," nor, given their tight closure, with the open structure of a wreath, which fights against any ideas of imprisonment. Even though there is no explicit mention of thorns, they subliminally present themselves in the next phase of the poem, for the "poignancy" of grief derives from "pungere," and pricking is also implied by "barb," "arrow" and "sting." The poem's climax, which turns tears into the blood of a wounded soul, shows how congruent Beddoes's sensibility is with Crashaw's. Consider this stanza from "The Weeper", with its apposition of tears and beads— Does thy song lull the air? Thy falling teares keep faithful time. Does thy sweet-breath'd praire Up in clouds of incense climb? Still at each sigh, that is, each stop, A bead, that is, A TEAR, does drop.26

—and then the appositives in the quatorzain: "Tears, the pure blood-drops of the wounded soul." Like Crashaw, Beddoes tracks the metaphor in the process of transfiguration, quite different from the merely augmentative treatment of tears in Donne's "Canonization": "Who says my tears have overflowed his ground?"27 The later poets both craft decorative surfaces on which pattern triumphs over plausibility, even if they come at the cost of affective power. For while they try to evoke intense feeling, they diffuse (and sometimes nullify) it in verbal arabesques. Crashaw's poem is less an evocation of sorrow than a beautifully fashioned lachrymatory; Beddoes's "pure blood-drops" have neither the poignancy of tears nor the horror of blood. They are crystalline simulacra of themselves.

“To Sound" 2 (p.53) This second attempt at the same project is as artificial as its predecessor, and shares the mesmeric emptying of reference that, later in the century,

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would typify the poetry of the Symbolistes. Beddoes looks toward Mallarmé's quest for a "pure" poetry that gives words the power to re-create reality. No wonder the Symbolist explored their suggestiveness and their reverberations—or that the successors to Symbolism would pant after pluralistic meanings. No wonder that a poet like Rimbaud tried to create a new language, or that a later poet like Mallarmé went so far as to break up ordinary relations among words in order to replace them with a new syntax of larger meanings.28

The quatorzain does something similar, less by deranging the syntax than by scrambling the very processes of apprehension: Thou hangest up in the caverns of our ears Thy precious dew-drops, and our inmost souls Echo thy beauty.

The moment the poet turns sound into a tear-shaped earring and suspends it from the "roof" of the ear instead of from its customary lobe, he is creating a bizarre and unreal world. Little imaginative effort is required to see a dewdrop as a jewel or to envisage the folded recess of a flower as an ear, as witness this moment in A Midsummer Night's Dream 2.1.14-15—"I must go seek some dew-drops here / And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear"—but we have to strain our minds when applying these images to abstract sound. To answer the question "What . . . is the essence of all music," Suzanne Langer proposed a "creation of virtual time, and its complete determination by the movement of audible forms."29 By the same token, when Beddoes uses words in ways that alter the conventional flow of meaning, he achieves a verbal approximation of non-functional harmony, all but realizing Pater's dictum that "art aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it."30 The sensuous texture of this quatorzain is so confused that it severs language from its referential function, and only the husks of words—Langerian "audible forms"—are left to float on a metrical (as opposed to a syntactic) stream. Beddoes tells us that sound is winged, and that its wings are feathered with notes, but no sooner does the bird Gestalt begin to form than it metamorphosizes into a moth— Thou hoverest with a wing plumed with sweet notes, Moth-like, around the chords where music's veil,

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A mist raised from tune's ocean, duskly floats;

—a surreal tableau made weirder still by the fact that the chords that attract the moth soon blur with the cords of a harp. And when the veil drifts into sight it reads for all the world like one of the marginal images that Dali habitually throws into his pictures, images that, inserted for the sake of their independent meanings, create a structural miscellany instead of an integrated design. The veil has hardly time to register before turning into mist, itself the exhalation of an oceanic tune. "Tune" is a too specific noun for Beddoes's purpose here; "melody" would have provided a generic colour better suited to the collective force of "ocean." Yet this catachresis, dealing as it does in vagueness, eludes our grasp at every attempted seizure: Or, fountained in the heart of nightingale, With tide of murmurs swellest along her throat; Sweet soother of my senses, flutter near, Or sleep for ever in my charmed ear.

Even though the images defy logical conjunction, currents of congruence still surface, the moth and nightingale connected by their nocturnal habits (mediated by the adverb "duskly"), and "tide" (catachretic in the context of a "fountain") retrospectively "explained" by "ocean." Long-distance cross-pollination also occurs between the blood of the nightingale and the "pure blood-drops of the wounded soul" in the preceding quatorzain. Beddoes has sound flowing over the nightingale's syrinx as blood through veins, a conceit suggested by the pulsation of her throat. The enallagic phrase "fountained in the heart" mixes the phrase "fons et origo" with the idea that the heart is the seat of feeling, and so suggests that sound is passion made audible. This brings us to the petitionary climax of the 28-line coupling. Beddoes invokes the sound with a vocative of agency ("Sweet soother of my senses") that seems to have been modelled on those in "Sleep and Poetry" ("Soft closer of our eyes / Low murmurer of tender lullabies!— Keats, p. 42), and also recalls the conclusion of "Bright Star"— Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever—or else swoon to death. (Keats, p. 372)

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—its hypnagogic blend of restfulness and attentiveness restated in "Sweet soother of my senses, flutter near, / Or sleep for ever in my charmed ear."

V "To Night" (p. 54) This quatorzain strikes a more conventional note, not least because its extended simile permits a measure of visualization. Beddoes has structured his poem by antapodosis—a comparison sustained through several points of contact—instead of using conceits that find only fleeting purchase on their tenors. "To Night" projects the sense of a familiar cycle in a way that recalls the "Ode to Evening" ("I hail / Thy genial loved return"—Gray, Collins, Goldsmith, p. 464). But whereas Collins had adopted a reverential tone, Beddoes images night as a scruffy corvid blotting out the sun: So thou art come again, old black-winged Night, Like an huge bird, between us and the sun, Hiding, with outstretched form, the genial light; And still, beneath thine icy bosom's dun And cloudy plumage, hatching fog-breathed blight, And embryo storms, and crabbed frosts, that shun Day's warm caress. (p. 54)

A comparable image had occurred in Thomas Moore's "Thou art, O God, the life and light" (1816), and was probably fresh in the poet's mind: When Night, with wings of starry gloom, O'ershadows all the earth and skies, Like some dark, beauteous bird, whose plume Is sparkling with unnumber'd eyes— That sacred gloom, those fires divine, So grand, so countless, LORD, are Thine!31

But whereas Moore takes the peacock's tail as a conventional point of departure, Beddoes strikes a more characterful and irreverent note with a crow. Angular hyberbaton forces the adverb "again" between the verb and the prepositional phrase that it governs ("between us and the sun") and follows this with another syntactic wedge ("Like an huge bird"). As a result, the sentence breaks into pieces, its disarray compounded by the interventive "out-stretched form" that separates "light" from "hiding" to enact the idea of eclipse. The persistence and silence of night register in the bivalent meaning of "still," the continued soundlessness of the brooding bird intensified by the immobile, frozen landscape around her.

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Unlike the Augustan night piece, which is usually associated with repose, Beddoes aims for an effect of discomfiture. In the Countess of Winchilsea's "Nocturnal Reverie," owls had blended with nightingales— And only gentle Zephyr fans his Wings, And lonely Philomel, still waking, sings; Or from some Tree, fam'd for the Owl's delight, She, hollowing clear, directs the Wand'rer right:32

—and the planctus of the owl in Gray's "Elegy" had done little to disrupt that poem's calm composure: Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower The moping owl does to the moon complain Of such as, wandering near her secret bower, Molest her ancient solitary reign. (p. 120)

Beddoes's Bubonids, on the other hand, display a gothic violence and vehemence: The owls from ivied loop Are shrieking homage, as thou cowerest high, Like sable crow pausing in eager stoop On the dim world thou gluttest thy clouded eye, Silently waiting latest time's fell whoop, When thou shalt quit thine eyrie in the sky, To pounce upon the world with eager claw, And tomb time, death, and substance in thy maw.

Instead of Gray's peaceful church, we have a military structure (the loop being a slit through which arrows were discharged), and the gentle querulousness of his owl has been sharpened into a "shriek" that recalls the dissonant corvids and owls in Macbeth—"The raven himself is hoarse / That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan / Under my battlements" (1.5.38-40); "It was the owl that shriek'd, the fatal bellman / Which gives the stern'st good-night" (2.2.3-4). Beddoes combines incompatible elements (both verbal and idiomatic) to create a sense of unease. A crow about to pounce is more likely to triumph than to "cower," unless we recover the etymology of that verb— "kuren" ("to lie in wait"). Birds of prey likewise have acute vision, whereas this one has rheumy eyes—logically enough, since night is the converse of clarity. One hears a Keatsian echo in the association of "glut" and "cloud," which recalls the "weeping cloud" and the command to "glut

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thy sorrow" (p. 220) in the "Ode on Melancholy," and whereas most apocalypses flame themselves into extinction, Beddoes has drawn inspiration from the off-beat finale of The Dunciad: Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor'd! Light dies before thy uncreating word: Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall; And Universal Darkness buries All.33

Donne had taunted death—"One short sleep past, we wake eternally, / And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die" (p. 313)—and Herbert had resurrected mortality instead of killing it ("Thou art grown fair and full of grace"34). Beddoes, by contrast, lets death suffer an occlusion, but it doesn't yield to anything better, simply vanishing into the greater oblivion of night. Enallage turns "tomb" into a verb, snatching away death's furniture in a comprehensive gesture—"And tomb time, death, and substance in thy maw"—that maw connected with the glutting of night's eye. Book 25 of the Metamorphoses presents time in terms of slow attrition— tempus edax rerum, tuque, invidiosa vestustas, omnia destruitis vitiataque dentibus aevi paulatim lenta consumitis omnia morte! [O Time, thou great devourer, and thou,envious Age, together you destroy all things;and, slowly gnawing with your teeth, you finally consume all things in lingering death.]35—

but Beddoes projects the idea of sudden engulfment. Like "cormorantdevouring Time" in Love's Labour's Lost 1.1.4, it swallows experience whole, and the quatorzain ends with an x-ray of its distended stomach.

VI "A Fantastic Simile" (p. 54) The Metaphysical poets never advertised the fact that they were trafficking in conceits, never announced, in other words, that they were composing "fantastic similes." The title of "The Canonization" might have set up a matrix for its extravagant analogies, but Donne stopped short of labelling them as such. However, the conceit had fallen from grace by the start of the nineteenth century, and this probably explains the selfconscious (not to say defensive) title of this quatorzain, which looks ahead

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to the similar announcement of method in Hopkins's "Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe": I say that we are wound With mercy round and round As if by air: the same Is Mary, more by name. She wild web, wondrous robe, Mantles the guilty globe,36

To proclaim an act of diction in this way is to affirm its eccentricity. Organic metaphors don't require spokespersonship, so Beddoes, like Hopkins after him, asserts the subjective perspective of his simile to preempt common-sense objections that might be adduced against the enterprise of the poem: A lover is a slender, glowing urn On beauty's shrine, his heart is incense sweet, Which with his eye-lit torch young love doth burn; Then from its ardour cloudy ringlets fleet, That we call sighs, and they with perfume turn Upwards, his mistress' whisperings to meet. (p. 54)

Beddoes here renovates the topos of the religio amoris that Pope travestied in The Rape of the Lock— For this, ere Phoebus rose, he had implor'd Propitious Heav'n, and ev'ry Pow'r ador'd, But chiefly Love—to Love an Altar built, Of twelve vast French Romances, neatly gilt. There lay three Garters, half a Pair of Gloves; And all the Trophies of his former Loves. With tender Billet-doux he lights the Pyre, And breathes three am'rous Sighs to raise the Fire. (p. 224)—

and which Keats chose rather to dignify in his "Ode to Psyche" ("Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane / In some untrodden region of my mind"—p. 212). "A Fantastic Simile" is likewise about a cultus of love conducted in mental space. The poet creates visual difficulties, however, by equating the heart with incense instead of treating it as its receptacle (in the same way that a casolette contains its fragrant granules) and, when the lover's eyes ignite it, one has no way of relating those eyes to the urn in the way that one could have related its handles to ears.

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These incoherent metalepses become bizarrely functional, however. Quintilian points out that it is in the nature of metalepsis "to form a kind of intermediate step between the term transferred and the thing to which it is transferred, having no meaning in itself but merely providing a transition,"37 and, by using it to build illogical bridges, Beddoes disassembles the poem into a items only tenuously connected, as when he imposes the Latin etymon "ardor" (combustion) upon the English meaning of the noun (intensity of feeling). Even though the strict construction of the syntax disallows it, the English sense of "ardour" also insinuates itself when the ascending smoke equates with lovers' sighs. Beddoes then tries to steady the "fantastic simile" with a prosaic gloss, its explanatory clause ("That we call sighs") recalling a similar moment in Hamlet: "long purples / That liberal shepherds give a grosser name, / But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them" (4.7.168-70). The smoke, doubling as curled hair, also correlates with the spiral course of tears in the "sparkling coil," and the clouds of incense morph into clouds of vapour that have floated in from Keats's "Autumn" ("While barred clouds bloom the soft-daying day, / And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue"—p. 219). Beddoes arbitrarily equates these clouds with the beloved's consent just as he had equated the incense clouds with the lover's passion: The breezy whispers and the sighs embrace, Like pink-winged clouds mixing above the hill, And from their lovely toyings spring a race Of tears, which saunter down in cheek-banked rill, Silvering with sparkling coil the fair one's face; Twin dew-drops which her startled senses spill From violet's eyes, that hide their tender hue, Deep-caverned in a fringed lake of blue.

The lovers' mingling engenders a race in the sense of "progeny" as well as "race"="channel" and "race"="rapid movement," the last meaning confirmed by the headlong rush of the enjambement. Beddoes creates a typical catachresis by running the speediness of "race" against the andante motion of "saunter" and allowing a new "fantastic simile" to come into focus—something along the lines of "A fair one is water course." This is far from flattering, for "cheek-banked" causes her nose to vanish into a facial depression, a containment so emphatic as to suggest a case of the mumps. Another illogical twist turns the copious rill into "Twin dew-drops," and then, as dizzyingly, back into a "fringed lake of blue," which then shrinks to the compass of a violet. So

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loose and suggestive has the syntax become that we can hardly protest that violets don't hide their colour within (the whole flower is evenly tinted), and it is they that are "caverned" and not their tint. (We have only to think in this regard of the violets in the "Ode to a Nightingale, "cover'd up in leaves"—p. 208.) The point about fantastic similes, however, is that they approximate their tenors instead of offering a precise fix upon them.

VII "Another." (p. 54) This poem, even though it has a "more-of-the-same" title, could better be characterized as a miniature apologue. Given the presence of a first and second position, and the sententia that binds them at the end, it presents itself as the most sonnet-like quatorzain of them all. Beddoes starts in the same half-focused mode that had ended its predecessor: 'Tis a moon-tinted primrose, with a well Of trembling dew; in its soft atmosphere, A tiny whirlwind of sweet smells, doth dwell A lady bird; and when no sound is near That elfin hermit fans the fairy bell With glazen wings, (mirrors, on which appear Atoms of colours that flizz by unseen;) And struts about his darling flower with pride.

Reading the first line, we aren't sure whether the pale yellow of the primrose resembles a specific shade of moonlight (sometimes refracted away from the blue side of the spectrum), or whether the moon has fantastically coloured the flower à la the olive trees in Leigh Hunt's Autobiography: "My wife said, that [they] looked as if they grew only by moonlight; which gives a better idea of their light, faded aspect, than a more prosaical description."38 Both ideas seem to obtain, which helps to correlate the circular flower with the disc in the night sky. The shrinkage of the one into the other establishes the ladybird's perspective, the same perspective that magnifies the small depression of the primrose into a "well." Beddoes duplicates this enlargement when he moves from "soft atmosphere" to "whirlwind," improbably caused by the insect's winnowing elytra. The wings beneath those carapace panels figure as "flimsy drapery," contrasting with their glossiness and "Atoms of colours." Although the meaning of "flizz" is "splinter off," Beddoes superadds an element of onomatopoeia by suggesting a portmanteau of "buzz" and "flit."

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Socially disaffected and solitary, but delighting in its natural environment, the ladybird represents the Romantic poet as Beddoes conceived his role: But, if some buzzing gnat with pettish spleen Come whining by, the insect 'gins to hide, And folds its flimsy drapery between His speckled buckler and soft, silken side. So poets fly the critic's snappish heat, And shield their minds with scorn and self-conceit. (p. 55)

This indicts professional criticism for its officiousness ("buzzing") and petulance ("whining"), and also suggests a irritating persistence on the part, say, of the Quarterly hacks—all this effected by a quick succession of participles. Fashioning a parable from the encounter, Beddoes makes the elytra a shield beneath which the poet's propulsive wings of inspiration fold away from view, and hints his vulnerability in the reference to a "soft, silken side."

VIII "To Silence" (p. 55) Having earlier tried to render sound into words, Beddoes now attempts to evoke silence through the medium of speech. It's an adunaton with a history, and can be traced back to Pope's poem "On Silence," which was itself composed in homage to Rochester's "On Nothing": Huge, viewless, ocean into which we cast Our passing words, and, as they sink away, An echo bubbles up upon the blast; Oh! could thy waves but vomit in their play Those unseen pearls which thou dost clasp so fast, And hang them at our ears washed in thy spray, What endless stores our casket, memory, Would brood upon, and enjoy. (p. 55)

The odd placement of the comma in the first line suggests that "Huge" and "viewless" are delayed adjectives that qualify "silence," and that that in turn stands in apposition to "ocean" (also warranting the epithets "Huge" and "viewless"). Since apposition immobilizes the momentum of speech, it helps enact its vanishing into the silence of the printed word. Silence, indeed, has always challenged mimesis, and requires the sort of fancy footwork that Keats provided in "I Stood Tip-Toe":

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. . . sweetly they slept On the blue field of heaven, and then there crept A little noiseless noise among the leaves, Born of the very sigh that silence heaves: (p. 3)

Beddoes is as deft and as paradoxical as his master, first turning words into pebbles, and then into the bubbles they displace in water (an identity of absence): "An echo bubbles up." This visual "echo" of vanishing words occurs also Hood's "Hero and Leander"—"his pearly breath unprison'd there / Flew up to join the universal air"39—a moment subtended in turn by one from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: When, for a moment, like a drop of rain, He sinks into thy depth with bubbling groan, Without a grave, unknell'd, uncoffin'd and unknown.40

"Passing words" imply both something incidental ("en passant") and transient (Herbert's "passing-bell"41), their after-sound all but lost in "blast" that receives it. Silence, the grave of utterance, becomes a de facto repository of the pearls in Matt.7.6 ("neither cast ye your pearls before swine"), and then the ocean, hitherto formless and vast, morphs into a gigantic oyster. Its pearls, made into earrings, and bathed in spray, suggest that the gems renew their lustre by contact with the sea. One thinks of an episode from Riders in the Chariot, though whether it be based on fact, I can't say: "Once her mistress had despatched her to the bay with a toy bucket to fetch sea-water for her pearls, because that was what the pearls needed."42 Not only does this confirm our sense that precious wisdom has been lost in the gulf of silence but it also intensifies our sense the loss insofar as they've been enriched by their immersion: "And hang them at our ears washed in thy spray." This seems merely decorative in a fin de siècle way, but reality breaks in on the back of an adversative conjunction: But wherefore now Dost thou engulph our talk, and floodest by Uphurling clouds upon our moody brow? E'en when we dumbly muse sometimes a sigh Of bursting blossom, or hoarse groan from bough Break through thy foam, like Venus, ocean sprung, And to our ears upon the wind are swung.

By reproaching an indifferent force, Beddoes does homage to such mockarraignments as "The Sun Rising" ("Why dost thou thus, / Through

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windows and through curtains call on us"43), but the effect is very different—bitter rather than faux-petulant. The poem takes a Symboliste turn when sound turns first into "bursting blossom" and then into a "hoarse groan from bough"—the boughs, one assumes, implying a grove of kelp, and the blossom suggested by foam on the waves. Foam and groans and bursting blossom all help to bring Venus Anadyomene to mind—"Some hold that she sprang from the foam which gathered about the genitals of Uranus, when Cronus threw them into the sea"44—and, with that, the idea that this silence will ultimately bear fruit. The otherwise uncooperative sea yields intimations—less of immortality than its converse—to those who "dumbly muse."

IX "To My Lyre" (p. 55) The lyre has long been a metonym for poetic composition. Here, for example, is Horace on the topic: praecipe lugubres cantus, Melpomene, cui liquidam pater vocem cum cithara dedit. [Teach me a song of mourning, O Melpomene,thou to whom the Father gave a liquid voiceand music of the lyre!]45

In early modern literature, however, the relationship between music and word and had weakened to a point of severance, so that Wyatt indifferently addresses his pen ("My pen, take payn a lytyll space / To folow that whyche dothe me chace"46) and his lute: "My lute awake! perfourme the last / Labor that thou and I shall wast" (p. 49). The poet and his instrument are from this point onward no longer indivorcible. The Romantics reversed this situation to some extent, occasionally letting the lyre figure as an equal partner. Franz von Schober's "An die Musik" comes to mind—"Oft hat ein Seufzer, deiner Harf' entflossen, / Ein süsser, heiliger Akkord von dir"47 [Oft has a sigh escaped your harp, / The sweet and holy harmony that's yours]—and Beddoes himself takes this idea to an even more daring extreme: My Lyre! thou art the bower of my senses, Where they may sleep in tuneful visions bound; These trembling chords shall be their breeze-kissed fences, Which are with music's tendril's warmly wound, As with some creeping shrub, which sweets dispenses, And on each quivering stalk blossoms a sound. (p. 55)

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Through the agency of "fantastic similes," the instrument becomes the centre of attention—a locus of "tuneful visions." These have kinship with the hypnagogic experience in Keats's "Ode on Indolence"—"And for the day faint visions there is store" (p. 357), subordinating the senses to mental harmony: "Where they may sleep in tuneful visions bound." Beddoes shares the Romantic fascination with the arbour, and makes the lyre a place of refuge like the bower in The Story of Rimini, which supplied the epigraph for "I Stood Tip-Toe"—"Places of nestling green for Poets made" (Keats, p. 4). Schober, advancing the same claim for music, provides an undefined mental space for the troubled listener, whereas Beddoes literally equates instrument and bower. Like those on Schober's "Harfe," the strings of the lyre tremble voluntarily, the chordal meaning of "chord" blending with "cord" to suggest the self-generated music of an Aeolian harp. But at the same time the cords/chords figure as an arbour trellis trained with vines—notated music, in other words, with trusses of grape-like crotchets and quavers. This prompts an additional metamorphosis, and the cords become the stretched lines of the musical stave. As in Coleridge's lime tree poem, this bower becomes a prison: My lyre! thou art the barred prison grate, Where shackled melody a bond-maid sleeps, And taunting breezes as her torturers wait: With radiant joy the hapless prisoner peeps And sings delight, with freedom's hope elate, When some fair hand upon the surface sweeps; And still she beats against the prison bars, Till brooding silence comes and smothers her pert jars.

Recalling the stock gothic figures of The Mysteries of Udolpho (with its sadistic gaoler and its prisoner who strikes "the strings of the lute . . . with a disordered hand"48), Beddoes turns music into a victim and the trellis into a prison grate. Breezes, unable to prompt vibrations in that rigid structure, tantalize music with the unfulfilled promise of the sound in which she has her being. Beddoes might be meditating on his own disappointments as a poet, for to whom is the "bond-maid" bound if not to him? For both of them, inspiration remains as elusive as the wind, a connection effected by the fact that "spiritus" (the Latin both for the "breath" and "breeze") is central to the experience of "inspiration." Just as Goethe viewed "Veni Creator Spiritus" as a "prayer to the artist's creative inspiration,"49 so melody silently invokes the movement of air at the end of the quatorzain, and is killed by its absence.

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X "To Poesy" (p. 56) This bears an even stronger resemblance to Schober's "An die Musik," for it subsists as a colloquy between the poet and his favoured art form. Many odes begin in vocative mode, and sketch out a "lineage" for the abstraction they invoke. Gray's "Ode to Adversity," for example, tells us that she is the "Daughter of Jove" (p. 70), and Wordsworth's "Ode to Duty" addresses her as the "Stern Daughter of the Voice of God" (p. 385), both generating a tone of formal reverence. Beddoes's family tree for Poesy, however, proves altogether more intimate and tender: Sweet sister of my soul! thou, that dost creep Gently into my bosom, and there to lie In converse with my spirit, and now weep And anguish it with kindly agony; Now draw it with thy lore dreadful and deep Through wild, appalling dreams;

Poetry personified cohabits with the speaker's soul, and turns the poem into a wedding song, an autoerotic epithalamion. Beddoes is less concerned with himself than with poets who have gone before him, a fact suggested through the tragic emotions of pity (defined by Joyce as "the feeling which arrests the mind . . . and unites it with the human sufferer"50) and terror (which "unites it with the secret cause"). The first of these he implies by "kindly agony," an oxymoron that beautifies suffering through art on the one hand, and, on the other, points to the sufferer's participation in that imitated pain ("kindly" registering also in the sense of "kindred"). Terror figures for its part as "wild, appalling dreams." But just as in Gray's "Ode to Adversity," anguish yields to sympathy— Thy form benign, oh Goddess, wear, Thy milder influence impart, Thy philosophic train be there To soften, not to wound my heart. (p. 73)

—and just as Wordsworth's Duty conceals a softer aspect beneath her sternness— Stern Lawgiver! Yet thou dost wear The Godhead's most benignant grace; Nor know we anything so fair As is the smile upon thy face: (p. 386)

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—so Beddoes moves to toyings and smiles: . . . then tenderly Toy and change smiles: oh! now I feel thee pour Into my breast thy gushing tears of sound, And bury thy sharp fang in my heart's core; Now balm with thy sweet breath the throbbing wound. Thou and my soul oft on thought's pinions soar, Clasping like dewdrops in a flower, around That cast their rainbow-eyed pale beams and kiss And tremble in their loveliness and bliss.

The idea of a fanged incision (measuring the intense nature of tragedy) pays compound homage to King Lear ("How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is / To have a thankless child"—1.4.286), Cleopatra's suicide, and Hermia's nightmare in A Midsummer Night's Dream ("Methought a serpent ate my heart away"—2.2.148. Beddoes's unstable, unsettled syntax ("Clasping like dewdrops in a flower, around / That cast their rainboweyed pale beams and kiss / And tremble in their loveliness and bliss.") bears comparison with that in Marvell's "On a Drop of Dew," which also enacts a fastidious recoiling and refusing to settle: Remembring still its former height, Shuns the sweat leaves and blossoms green; And, recollecting its own Light, Does, in its pure and circling thoughts, express The greater Heaven in a Heaven less.51

XI "A Clock Striking at Midnight" (p. 56) There can be little doubt that this poem was prompted by Milton's canzone "On Time." Compare, for example, the paradoxical combination of flight and leadenness in Fly envious Time, till thou run out thy race, Call on the lazy leaden-stepping hours, Whose speed is but the heavy Plummet's pace52

with Beddoes's "century, / That on its hundred feet, a sluggish thing / Gnawing away the world." His Time is not the less relentless for being sluggish and slug-like, however, and its inexorability registers in the enjambment of the two quatorzains, which evokes the passage of sand through an hour glass. Taking midnight as the point of diurnal transition,

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he also presents it as a transition between two larger spans of time, though he couldn't have written this poem (as he hints he did) on New Year's eve, 1801, and was more probably inspired by Donne's "Nocturnal upon S. Lucy's Day, Being the Shortest Day," for that had also associated microcosmic and macrocosmic bisections of time: "'Tis the year's midnight and it is the day's" (p. 72). The first quatorzain (the left wing of the diptych, as it were) begins in medias res, and invites us to listen to the sound of time at the very point of its vanishing. The title, which alone establishes the presence of the clock, helps convert its regular tick into the percussion of heels on a pavement: Hark to the echo of Time's footsteps; gone Those moments are into the unseen grave Of ages. They have vanished nameless. None, While they are deep under the eddying wave Of the chaotic past, shall place a stone Sacred to these, the nurses of the brave, The mighty and the good.

Beddoes then shifts to a bleak, impersonal landscape—"the unseen grave / Of ages"—with all the vastness and vagueness of the sublime. The grave (real enough as the metonym of extinction) has no physical location, and must therefore be coextensive with the universe itself, and "the eddying wave / Of the chaotic past" all but rewrites the Hebrew myth of Genesis, decreating experience into a primal shapelessness: "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep" (1.2). A sonnetary volta occurs when the poet swings his attention from the past to the future. Time, without which existence can't be measured, is bent upon its own destruction, its birthing of futurity not so much a source of life as a death sentence: Futurity Broods on the ocean, hatching 'neath her wing Invisible to man the century, That on its hundred feet, a sluggish thing Gnawing away the world, shall totter by And sweep dead mortals with it. As I sing Time, the colossus of the world, that strides With each foot plunged in darkness silent glides,

Just as in Horace's Ars Poetica, "parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus" ["Mountains will labour, to birth will come a laughter-rousing mouse!"],53 so here a sublime, effortful pregnancy comes to grotesque

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fruition in the centipede that feeds on decay: "the century, / That on its hundred feet, a sluggish thing / Gnawing away the world." Time itself links the "chaotic past" with this abortive creature. Initially off-staged as a vanishing presence, it now takes on a palpable reality that brings Julius Caesar to mind—"he doth bestride the narrow world / Like a Colossus, and we petty men / Walk under his huge legs" (1.2.134). Whereas that "bestride" implies stasis, Beddoes's Time strides dynamically, and, in so doing, recalls the restlessness of 1 Pet. 5.8— "because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour"—and Psalm 91.6: "the pestilence that walketh in darkness." Its relentless pace forces the first quatorzain to run into the second— And puffs death's cloud upon us. It is vain To struggle with the tide; we all must sink Still grasping the thin air, with frantic pain Grappling with Fame to buoy us.

—underscoring the idea of extinction by poisonous exhalations above and irresistible currents below, to which modal of compulsion ("must") and the distributive adjective ("all") admit no exception. The unresolved participles ("grasping" and "grappling") further project the sense of futility that, as Beddoes aged, would come to typify his outlook on life. It's an unusual stance for a poet so young: Shelley, equally unorthodox, could at least envisage resurrection as a persistence of memory—"Oblivion as they rose shrank like a thing reproved"54—and so, like Donne, could taunt death into non-existence: "He lives, he wakes—'Tis Death is dead, not he" (p. 495). Beddoes offers no such consolation: Can we think Eternity, by whom swift Time is slain, And dragged along to dark destruction's brink, Shall be the echo of man's puny words? Or that our grovelling thoughts shell e'er be writ In never-fading stars; or like proud birds Undazzled in their cloud-built eyrie sit Clutching the lightning, or in darting herds Diving amid the sea's vast treasury flit? Sink, painted clay, back to thy parent earth While the glad spirit seeks a brighter birth.

Death-defying discourse such as Donne's and Shelley's ordinarily relies on bdelygmia, a trope that, as Peacham points out, suggests "how much a

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speaker hateth and abhorreth some person, word, deed."55 Beddoes, on the other hand, directs his scorn at humankind, at death's paltry victim. Michael O'Neill notes that the "language is suffused with a foreknowledge, even a welcoming, of neglect. Uncannily [Beddoes] contrives a relationship with his reader that is intimate yet aloof, taunting us and himself with the transience attendant on 'painted clay.'"56 "Painted clay" makes humankind seem meretricious as well as feeble. One thinks of Hamlet's telling his lady that though she "paint an inch thick," she can't disguise the underlying skull (5.1.186-88), though that image leaves us with a firm residuum of bone. Beddoes's paint, on the other hand, vanishes with the soluble clay that bears it.

To a Bunch of Grapes Ripening at my Window (p. 57) H. W. Donner regards this poem as an "exquisite arabesque of playful imagination where the central idea, like the variations on a theme in music, strays away only to return, and returns repentant only to stray away again"57: Cluster of pregnant berries, pressed In luscious warmth together, Like golden eggs in glassy nest, Hatched by the zephyr's dewy breast In sultry weather; Or amber tears of those sad girls Who mourn their hapless brother; Strung closely on the glossy curls Of yon fair shrub, whose zigzag twirls Clip one another;

Following the example of Herbert's "Sunday" ("O day most calm, most bright, / The fruit of this, the next worlds bud, / Th'indorsement of supreme delight, / Writ by a friend, and with his bloud"—p. 75) and "Prayer (I)" ("Prayer the Churches banquet, Angels age, / Gods breath in man returning to his birth, / The soul in paraphrase, the heart in pilgrimage"—p. 51), Beddoes has fashioned his poem from appositions, each successive take on the grapes marked by a separative conjunction ("or"). It's also an exercise in peristasis, which is what the rhetors term a "plenitude of thought," achieved "by expounding the circumstances of our subject, its cause, occasion, instrument, time, mode . . . in vivid representation."58 The stanza pattern—4a3b4a4a2b—enhances that vividness, the stricture of the trimeter imaging of nestled grapes that "Clip

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one another" in "luscious warmth," and the medial couplet receiving an added impetus from the a rhyme that precedes it. The first variation is comparatively cautious, exact correlations being made between the concave dish and the "glassy nest," and between the fruit and the "golden eggs," but the next, more adventurous, touches on Ovid's aetiology of amber: —cortex in verba novissima venit. unde fluunt lacrimae, stellataque sole rigescunt de ramis electra novis, quae lucidus amnis excipit et nuribus mittit gestanda Latinis. [—the bark closed over her latest words. Still the tears flow on, and these tears, hardened into amber by the sun, drop down from the new-made trees. The clear riverreceives them and bears them onward, one day to be worn by the brides of Rome.]59

Whereas Ovid fails to identify his trees, Virgil proves more obliging— "tum Phaethontiadas musco circumdat amarare / corticis atque solo proceras erigit alnos" [then he encircles Phaëthon's sisters in moss of bitter bark, and raises them from the ground as lofty alders].60 "Yon fair shrub" might therefore seem to suggest that an alder growing outside the poet's window, but even if there were, we're in England (albeit in the probable west of England, and under the aegis of the Gulf Stream) and its being wreathed with a grapevine seems unlikely. Ignoring the fact that the grapes have already been picked, this variation of the poem's chaconne regrafts them to the vine: Or silent swarm of golden bees Your velvet bosoms brushing, Dropped odorous from the gummy breeze, Lingering in sleep upon the trees, Whilst summer's blushing;

Beddoes by-passes the physical dissimilarity of grapes and bees in favour of a looser connection—sweetness—and, through the transferred epithet of "gummy breeze," all but steeps the scene in the viscous honey. He also ignores those insects' industry so as to craft an idyll of languor and indolence in which their purposeful flight becomes a passive falling ("Dropped odorous") that looks ahead to Tennyson's "Lotos-Eaters." Beddoes cuts next to an obsessive close-up of the grapes, their veins fantastically rendered as a fairy net and their golden colour imaged as liquefied sunlight:

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Chapter Three Or liquid sun-beams, swathed in net Spun by some vagrant fairy, Like mimic lamps fresh trimmed and set In thick festoons, with ripeness wet, Moonlight to carry;

While Marvell's "Bermudas" provides the point of departure here ("He hangs in shades the Orange bright, / Like golden Lamps in a green Night"61), the "mimic lamps" also evoke strings of Chinese lanterns, and, in order to set them glowing in the dusk—I take "carry" to mean "augment"—Beddoes floods the scene with moonlight, notwithstanding the sun that has shone in preceding lines. This inconsistency springs from the polyvalent character of his imagination, and it's less a flaw than a consequence of a rampant fecundity with which even Shakespeare could sometimes be reproached, were one pedantic enough to try. Editors, for example, have attempted to regulate such lines as these from All's Well That Ends Well—"Natural rebellion done i' th' blade of youth, / When oil and fire, too strong for reason's force / O'erbears it and burns on" (5.3.6-8), but others such as G. K Hunter have argued against any change: "blade (green shoot) is not congruous with that of oil, . . . it agrees with Natural. This mixing of metaphors, however, is common enough in Shakespeare to make the emendation to blaze unnecessary."62 And if Shakespeare can be forgiven for reckless invention, so too can Beddoes in his own "blade of youth," when powers "too strong for reason's force" will burn unchecked. Goethe observes that all art begins in the act of connection, an act that, by its very nature, will tend toward incongruity: Much that is beautiful stands as an isolated entity in the world, but the spirit has to discover connections and thus to create works of art. . . . No bush, no tree whose charm may not be enhanced by a neighbouring rock or brook, by a simple prospect in the distance.63

Beddoes's grapes likewise have their charm enhanced by spatial and temporal prospects in the distance. And, to conclude it all, we glimpse their end, rendered with the same sort of gusto that had prompted Keats to crush "grape's joy against the palate fine" (p. 220), though here the languor of "ooze" half-neutralizes the vigour of "gushes": Or drops of honey, lately stolen From the hive's treasury, Bubbles of light, with sweetness swollen, Balls of bright juice, by breezes rollen,

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And bandied high, I watch with wondrous care each day Your little spotted blushes, Dyed by the sun's rude staring ray; And soon I hope you'll ooze away In sunny gushes. Then shall ye, veiled in misty fume, In polished urn be flowing, With blood of nectar, soul perfume, Breathe on our cheeks a downy bloom With pleasure glowing. (pp. 57-58)

And even though one senses the kinetic energy that has "bandied high," bouncing against its dimeter confines, the effect is marred by a bizarrerie that turns nectar into blood. Still, the grape poem provides an admirable coda to this grouping of Miscellaneous Poems. Intoxicating and vaporous, and perpetually trying to body forth the unembodiable, they do amount to a "soul perfume" of sorts.

CHAPTER FOUR OUTIDANA PART 1

In his edition of Beddoes’s verse, H. W. Donner observes that although few of "the poems now printed as Outidana . . . belonged to the collection so called by their author," he thinks "it right to preserve the title, assigned to the collection he prepared after the publication of The Brides' Tragedy."1 This title derives from the Greek ȠȣIJįĮȞȠȢ, which Liddell and Scott gloss as "useless, worthless, good for naught," and which, according to Donner, implies an authorial judgement on the quality of the verse: The instances we possess of his early poems do not raise great expectations. They are either cold philosophical speculations or strings of words without either much meaning or any of the feeling in which his dramatic writing is steeped. Perhaps it was in the consciousness of this that he called his book Outidana—'poems of no importance' might have been his own translation of the learned title, had he lived to witness the performance of Oscar Wilde."2

I disagree altogether, both in respect of verse quality and of the author's motive for the title. As I see it, Outidana advertises a restriction of scope rather than an apology for imperfect execution, and it invites us to regard the contents as so many "bagatelles" in the musical sense of that term. Glossed by The Oxford Companion to Music as a "trifle," and, by extension, "a short and unpretentious instrumental composition,"3 bagatelles have taken form as charming morceaux, those of Beethoven, above all, affording glimpses of a profound and strenuous composer in lyric dishabille. The title Outidana has a similarly self-deprecating colour, and advises us to place in abeyance any expectation of high-flown epics or odes. At the same time, however, the poems in the collection scarcely qualify as lightweight offerings. "The Romance of the Lily," though published in The Album (1823), escapes the trivial decorativeness that one ordinarily associates with Keepsake verse by recurring to the idiom of "The Improvisatore." As in the case of the latter, Beddoes sets its narrative in a frame of graduated levels. He begins with a protreptic gesture, the sort of

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command that one finds in "Scorn not the sonnet" and in other poems that command a posture and then adduce arguments in support of it: Ever love the lily pale, The flower of ladies' breasts; For there is passion on its cheek, Its leaves a timorous sorrow speak, And its perfume sighs a gentle tale To its own young buds, and the wooing gale, And the piteous dew that near it rests.4

Mention of a "lily pale" inevitably brings St Joseph's or Madonna lilies to mind, an association with chastity partly subverted when Beddoes relates its conical form to that of a female breast, the ambiguous preposition ("of") suggesting both location and resemblance. "Passion," too, is ambiguous, for it evokes both erotic feeling and the suffering contained by its etymon ("passio"). The throats of some St Joseph's lilies are stained with claret, which Beddoes takes as an amorous signifié (construing the colour as a flush), and (reading it as a bruise) also forces to function as a sign of "timorous sorrow." As in "Scorn not the sonnet," where the opening injunction is validated by reasons ("with this key / Shakespeare unlocked his heart; the melody / Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch's wound"5), Beddoes supports his command ("Ever love the lily pale") with a hint of its heavenly origin. Being no "earthly common flower / For man to pull, and maidens wear / On the wreathed midnight of their hair," it figures as an amaranth come down from heaven, its exalted purity guaranteed by a "noli me tangere." But, as Christopher Ricks observes, "you cannot employ the English language" to deny an object "without our glimpsing—through the interstices of the negative—"6 the object denied. So it is that we immediately visualize the lilies wreathed into dark hair, notwithstanding the poet's Verbot. Vivid hypallage turns the impalpable temporal meaning of "midnight" into a concrete noun of colour, though the magic associated with that dial hour also enters into the image. Beddoes develops these graphic juxtapositions of black and white later in the exordium, but first offers another reason for the protrope that has set the poem in motion: For Venus kissed it as it sprung, And gave it one immortal tear, When the forgotten goddess hung, Woe-bowed, o'er Adon's daisied bier; Its petals, brimmed with sweet cool air, Are chaste as the words of a virgin's prayer—

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Chapter Four And it lives alight in the greenwood shade, Like a love-thought, chequered o'er with fear, In the memory of that self-same maid. (p. 59)

If Greek legend does provide an aetiology of the lily—I haven't been able to trace one—its absence (or at the very least, its obscurity) gives Beddoes licence to create his own. Blotting out the anemone that, according to Ovid, Venus conjured out of the blood of Adonis, he puts the lily in its place, and whereas in the Metamorphoses the goddess expressly fashions her flower from a magical mixture of blood and nectar— sic fata cruorem nectare odorato sparsit, qui tactus ab illo intumit sic, ut fulvo perlucida caeno surgere bulla solet, nec plena longior hora facta mora est, cum flos de sanguine concolor ortus. [So saying, with sweet-scented nectar she sprinkled the blood, and this, touched by the nectar, swelled as when clear bubbles rise up from yellow mud. With no longer than an hour's delay a flower sprang up of blood-red hue . . .]7

—Beddoes's lily blooms spontaneously, without any divine intervention. Indeed, it looks ahead to one of Beardsley's Salomeimages, where it springs from the Baptist's blood. (Since it's unlikely that the fin de siècle artist would have read "The Romance of the Lily," his syncretism probably sprang from the standard fusion of saint and vegetation god: "In Sardinia the gardens of Adonis are still planted in connexion with the great Midsummer festival which bears the name of St. John"9). The coupling of Venus and the lily confirms the melding of passion and virginal pallor at the start of the poem, and widens the compass of its meaning. Because it signified transience in Roman culture, Horace opposes the "lilium breve" to "vivax apium" ("long-lasting parsley"8) in one of his odes, but Christianity associates it with spirituality and immortal life, Gabriel almost invariably carrying a Madonna lily in Renaissance Annunciations. Beddoes draws on this tradition of imperishability for another aetiological conceit. The "immortal tear" bestowed by Venus would seem to be globular stigma at the end of the pistil, read as the outward and visible sign of her inward and invisible grief. Furthermore, the "frozen" tear also recalls the singular metonym of grief familiar from elegies ("He gave to Misery all he had, a tear"10), while epithet "forgotten" reminds us of Adonis' indifference ("Hunting he lov'd, but love he laughed to scorn"11). Beddoes has layered the participle

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with additional colour, hinting that Venus has fallen from consciousness, a part of the "glory and loveliness"12 that, in Keats's lament, vanished with the passing of Hellenic culture. The symbolic compound thus fuses pagan values with the lily's traditional adjunction to the Virgin Mary. Venus, forgotten by the man she loves, counterpoints the fidelity of the speaker who mourns for Mary beyond the grave, and the arch of her grief over Adonis' bier ("woe-bowed") duplicates the arched stem of the flower that emblematizes her passion. That arch also helps configure the flower as a lantern that "lives alight in the greenwood shade, / Like a love-thought, chequered o'er with fear," an image through which Beddoes compounds the luminous oranges of "Bermudas" ("Like golden Lamps in a green Night"13) with the verdant essence of "The Garden"—"Annihilating all that's made / To a green Thought in a green Shade" (p. 52). By comparing the lily to something purely mental, he turns it into an emanation, a luminous rather than a vegetable presence ("alight), one that is as reluctant to embrace its physicality as a virgin the carnal aspect of love. This timorous chastity leaves Venus far behind, and helps the speaker modulate to the purity of his lost Mary. This Beethovenian "immortal beloved", like her Christian namesake, has by-passed death by dormition and assumption. The epanorthosis ensures, however, that it's a rhetorical rather than a "factual" claim: "Die! no, thou didst not—but some other way / Wentest to bliss" (p. 59). Such a complex, self-qualifying idiom, with its metanoia and framing parenthesis, reminds one of the grief in Donne's "Nocturnal"—equally crabbed and self-retortive when it tries to define away the beloved’s death: "But I am by her death (which word wrongs her) / Of the first nothing, the elixir grown."14 The speaker's emotional disorder, stylized by the self-correction and the jagged shift from second to third person (and therefore trenching on incoherence), suggests the rawness of his grief. And it also introduces a new element into the exordium, a personal bereavement that answers the protrope of "Ever love the lily pale" with the antiphon "I ever have loved the lily pale, / For the sake of one whom heaven has ta'en." Beddoes's purpose in morphing the lily from a pagan to a quasiChristian emblem now becomes clear, for the pendent Venereal flower turns into a vertical chalice brimming with "cool sweet air"—open to the heavens instead of inclining to the earth, earthy. The "Salve Regina" asks the biblical counterpart of Beddoes’s Mary to turn her merciful gaze on those "mourning and weeping in this vale of tears"15—a close enough approximation to the poem’s "prison of man, the palace of pain." Also like the biblical Mary, she figures as a being exempt from sin ("sine labe originali concepta"16) and therefore shielded from its mortal wages.

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Mariolatry also explains the autumnal reference, for the feast of the Assumption falls on 15 August: In autumn, Mary, thou didst die, (Die! no, thou didst not—but some other way Wentest to bliss; she could not die like men; Immortal into immortality She went; our sorrows know she went;) and then We laid her in a grassy bed (The mortal her) to sleep for ever, (p. 59)

Sustaining the Marian tone, Beddoes presents the lily's springing from the grave as a parthenogenesis akin to the mythical conception of Jesus, "baby" signifying a surrogate infant as much as it does the size of the bloom: For a human bloom, a baby flower, Uprose in talismanic birth; Where foliage was forbid to wave, Engendered by no seed, or shower, A lily grew on Mary's grave. (p. 60)

Thus does a redemptive presence arise on soil as cursed or infertile as the Aceldama, though Beddoes, often prone to letting loose threads hang, makes no attempt to explain why this should be so. He is clearer with regard to the lily’s association with the dogma of the virgin birth, and deletes all sense of male agency, using the "shower" to hint (and then to cancel) the ravishment of Danaë. However, at the start of the next verse paragraph, the biblical colour of "lay" paradoxically reinstates the idea of sublimated sexual congress: Last eve I lay by that blossom fair, Alone I lay to think and weep; An awe was on the fading hour; And 'midst the sweetness of the flower There played a star of plumage rare, A bird from off the ebon trees, That grow o'er midnight's rocky steep; One of those glorious eyes In myriads sown the restless sees, And thinks what lustrous dew there lies Upon the violets of the skies; (p. 60)

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Here the contraction of "evening" to "eve" (charged with the old mediaeval inversion of "Eva" to "Ave") extends the play between the sacred and profane modes of love. The rocking repetition of "lay" (a function of Beddoes's habitual metanoia), and its accompanying hint of coitus with the surrogate flower, gives way to solitude when the adverb "alone" supervenes. Many allusions crowd enrichingly upon the passage in hand—the melancholic recumbency of Jaques in As You Like It ("as he lay along / Under an oak, whose antique root peeps out"—2.1.30-31), the conscious act of contemplation in Shakespeare's Sonnet 30 ("When to the sessions of sweet silent thought, / I summon up remembrance of things past"17) and the rapt calm of Wordsworth's "It is a beauteous evening, calm and free"—"The holy time is quiet as a Nun / Breathless with adoration" (p. 205). Beddoes also draws on the trope of overheard monologue such as we find in Shakespeare's "Lover's Complaint" and in such mediaeval lyrics as "Now springes the spray": "Seigh I whar a litel may / Began to singe."18 The metaphoric structure is so compacted and interfused at this point that Donner assumes the story to be "told by a heavenly nightingale" (p. 119), but this is not the case. The radial, pointed segments of the lily trumpet recall the pentagonal graphic formula for a star, and present it as the latter’s incarnation, a silvery bird arrived on the earth from a dark grove (which is to say, the clouds blotting out the night sky). Its petals become its "plumage rare" by indirection, and its story is ventriloquized— as though through a floral speaking-trumpet—by the star itself—no doubt one of those projected in The Merchant of Venice 5.1.61 as singing like an angel. We should also recall that in Eastern Orthodox iconography, a star is often shown on the Virgin's shoulder to signify the conception of the (spoken) Logos: "a fallen flare / Through the hollow of an ear."19 In contrast with the precision of "Tam O'Shanter," which describes midnight as "That hour, o' night's black arch the keystane"20—a metaphor as lucidly architectural as its own vehicle—Beddoes's "ebon trees" of midnight have the loose evocativeness of Shelley's "tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean."21 His procedure in this regard might be termed "Hebraic," for he traffics in approximations rather than exact correlates. The Song of Solomon, for example, hymns the beloved as "a company of horses in Pharaoh's chariots" (1.9) and "a cluster of camphire in the vineyards of Engedi," allowing no immediate point of purchase between those images and the female person to which they apply. Effecting his modulation through the ocular design of a peacock's tail, Beddoes superimposes upon his feathered star the "oes and eyes" of A Midsummer Night's Dream 3.2.188, an image with an independent

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resonance of its own: "stars; oes=orbs, and spangles (for visual effect in a masque, says Bacon, 'Oes; or Spangs are of most glory': Essays, ed. Wright, XXXVII, quoted Halliwell)."22 The "restless" vision upon which they register is clearly that of the speaker, abroad at night like the isolatos of the Age of Sensibility, and the reciprocal gaze of the stars and the griefstricken keeper of vigils ushers in the idea of dew as displaced tears. By sprinkling it on a nocturnal bed of violets, Beddoes completes the circle and takes us back to Venus, called "'violet-crowned' in [Homer's] second Hymn to Aphrodite 618."23One notes again the loose, "Hebraic" procession of ideas, more suggestive than capable of strict construction. At this point, the night sky has become all at once a grove of black trees and a field of violets, and the stars, simultaneously, brilliant birds, penetrating eyes and glittering dew. Whereas The Merchant of Venice presents its heavenly bodies as angels, Beddoes calls his an "angel nightingale," "angel" functioning as an epithet ("the bearer of messages") rather than a substantive. This reinstates the half-forgotten grove of "ebon trees" as a likely resort of nightingales, but, such is the tortuous path of the poet's imagination, it isn't a nightingale, and therefore doesn't sing in propria persona. Instead it is a nightingale-like, angelic star that, having found nonce embodiment in the starriness of Mary's lily, imparts heavenly wisdom for its own delight and edification ("And to itself"). It's this that the speaker, like his counterpart in the "The Lover's Complaint," overhears and relays to the reader. All this might seem much ado about nothing, but there is a certain fascination in the way Beddoes involutes the act of transmission into a maze of interlocking images: And to itself unnumbered ditties Sang that angel nightingale, Secrets of the heavenly cities; And many a strange and fearful word, Which in her arbour she had heard, When the court of seraphs sate To seal some ghost's eternal fate;

There can be no doubting that this draws on traditional Christian sources and then subjects them to creative distortions. The new Jerusalem of Rev. 21.10-27 and Augustine's absolute Civitas Dei multiply into a mass of "heavenly cities," their judgement seats filled by seraphs instead of the forensic deity invoked by the "Dies Irae." This "salva reverentia" displacement of a god by seraphim bears comparison—although there is no possibility of actual influence—with Andrei Rublëv's icon of the

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Trinity, viz, three "angels, seated at a low table, . . . a closely-knit group that it is impossible not to interpret it as embodying the ideal of peace and harmony."25That much, at least, is mentally manageable, but the lines introduce the star-nightingale-lily's actual narrative defy explication: And the wind, beneath whose current deep My soul was pillowed in her sleep— Thus breathed the mystic warbler's tale:—

If the soul be "beneath" the wind's current, it must in some sense subsist at a point beyond its movement, and if "pillowed" in sleep (another separative medium) it can't receive its message—unless we redirect the possessive pronoun ("her") from the feminine "anima" to a feminine compounding of star, nightingale and lily, and assume that the sleep is a kind of shamanistic trance by which the speaker finds access to the flower's tale. After hugely elaborate proem, the tale gets underway. Beddoes flags it with a differentiated metric and with a narrative deportment less dreamy and more purposeful. The exordium, with the exception of the three-foot second line ("The flower of ladies' breasts"), consists of tetrameters. Its loosely rhymed verse paragraphs recall the Cowleyan Pindarique, the random indentations of the left-hand margin creating an organic, swaying outline. This lack of regimentation accords with the slow arrival of the delayed rhymes, some of which all but slip from sight (as they do, for example, in Herbert's "Collar") before eventually coming home to roost. In the tale proper, on the other hand, the regular supervention of trimeters makes for a more alert and vigorous gait, prone to clippings-back rather than to expansions: King Balthasar has a tower of gold, And rubies pave his hall; A magic sun of diamond blazes Above his palace wall; And beaming spheres play round in mazes, With locks of incense o'er them rolled. Young Balthasar is a Libyan king, The lord of wizard sages; He hath read the sun, he hath read the moon, Heaven's thoughts are on their pages.

Here the historic present gives a ballad feel to the narration, recalling, as it does, the start of "Sir Patrick Spens"—"The king sits in Dunfermline toun, / Drinking the blude-red wine"26—while incremental repetition ("King

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Balthasar has a tower of gold"; "Young Balthazar is the Libyan king") also harks back to the ritual repetitions of that poem: The first line that Sir Patrick read, A loud laugh laughèd he; The neist word that Sir Patrick read, The tear blinded his ee. (p. 435)

The poem’s romance ethos declares itself in an extravagant massiness of precious stones, a detail that might have derived from Meric Casaubon's True & Faithful Relation—"But greater are her walls; for they are of Diamond"27—as does the narrative motif of a man, "who after his death was restored to life to make a Confession of a horrible Murder committed upon his own Wife, for which he had never been suspected,"28), a point picked up by Donner in his monograph (p. 119). A more immediate source for the romance improbabilities of gemstone structures would have presented itself in Endymion—"Rich opal domes were seen, on high upheld / By jasper pillars" (Keats, p. 126)—and, as a schoolboy construing Pliny, Beddoes might well have encountered the fantastic architectural enterprises of Scaurus: ima pars scaenae e marmore fuit, media e vitro, inaudito etiam postea genere luxuriate, summa e tabulis inauratis. [The lowest storey of the stage was of marble, and the middle one of glass (an extravagance unparalleled even in later times), while the top storey was made of gilded planks.]29

Balthasar's fanciful orrery turns his palace into a miniature universe, its precious materials a function of the conspicuous consumption traditionally attributed to the orient. It also hints at his necromancy insofar as a "magic" sun displaces the real one, even though that costly simulacrum in no way deters him from studying actual heavenly bodies. His philomathic kingship encompasses both the temporal and the intellectual domains— "Young Balthasar is the Libyan king, / The lord of wizard sages"—and he tries to bridge them in a somewhat Beddovian way, for the poet himself studied medicine at Göttingen to arrive at an empirical understanding of the soul. While the ballad symmetry of "He hath read the sun, he hath read the moon" has the force of an incantation, the word "reading" embodies a more rational, scientific position, as much suggestive of Galilean telescopes as cabbalistic books. Four years later, Keble—probably innocent of Hood's poem—would also celebrate to the "knowledge"

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encrypted in the "liber naturalis," though for him, needless to say, it inscribes orthodox Christian dogma: There is a book, who runs may read, Which heavenly truth imparts, And all the lore its scholars need, Pure eyes and Christian hearts. The works of God, above, below, Within us and around, Are pages in that book, to show How God Himself is found.30

Setting the passages beside each other, one can't help feeling that Keble's bland comprehensiveness—his fussy run of prepositions to all points of the compass—suffers in comparison with the energy and poise of Beddoes's version: He hath read the sun, he hath read the moon, Heaven's thoughts are on their pages; He knows the meaning of night and noon, And the spell on morning's wing:

We can locate the interface between necromantic arcana and legitimate astronomical study in the shift from neutral referents ("sun" and "moon") to the supernatural language of "Heaven's thoughts," "Heaven" here periphrasing a syncretic deity that combines Jove and Jehovah (the colloquy between god and king like that of Genesis 3.8—"And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day"). Beddoes repeats the modulation from science to theology when he moves from a rational "know" (Balthasar's grasp of the relative motions of moon and earth and sun) to an irrational "spell" associated with a winged goddess Eos. A similar shift from the plausible to the bizarre marks the next phase of the poem, which begins in oceanography and ends in magic: The ocean he hath studied well, Its maddest waves he hath subdued Beneath an icy yoke, And lashed them till they howled, and spoke The mysteries of the Titan brood, And all their god forbade them tell. (p. 61)

In a process that displaces the established hierarchy of powers, Balthasar by-passes Poseidon, the Olympian usurper of the "astrological" Titans, and

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seeks illumination from Tethys and Oceanus, gods associated with the origin of life in some Greek cosmogonies: "I am going to the ends of the fruitful earth to visit Ocean, the forbear of the gods, and Mother Tethys."30 And it goes without saying that the ocean has often been connected with the origins of life, a Pelasgian creation myth claiming that Eurynome "assumed the form of a dove, brooding on the waves and, in due process of time, laid the Universal Egg".31 Like Moses, Balthasar comes face to face with his deity, or so one assumes from the Michelangelesque iconography of a god that leans from clouds to with a finger poised to trace a mystery. The fusion of grandeur and intimacy, of gargantuan figures leaning earthward, might also have inspired Rossetti ("The blessed damozel leaned out / From the gold bar of Heaven"32), but, as in the case of Keble, this seems unlikely: He hath beheld the storm, When the phantom of its form Leans out of heaven to trace, Upon the earth and sea, And air's cerulean face, In earthquake, thunder, war, and fire, And pestilence, and madness dire, That mighty woe, futurity. (p. 61)

The "phantom of [the storm's] form" contains a Chinese box of deific presences, hinting ultimately at the Yahweh of Psalm 29.3: "The voice of the Lord is upon the waters: the God of glory thundereth: the Lord is upon many waters." Beddoes's storm is not a mere tempest but also the agent of fate, a fact made plain by harsh apposition: "That mighty woe, futurity." The OED signification of "trace" 7.a—"To make out and follow (with the eye or mind) the course or line of; to ascertain (the course or line of something)"—seems less appropriate here than that attached to 11.a—"To draw; to draw an outline or figure of; also, to put down in writing, to pen. [So OF. tracier.]"—for the finger is forging knowledge rather than passively following the contours of a datum already known. Balthasar's facing out the storm in pursuit of these arcana reminds one of Leopold in "The Improvisatore": He knew no playmates but the stormy blasts, Which seemed to whisper some dark, secret dread As he would sleep among them, with his head Swathed in lank dripping tresses, and cry out With joy to his rude playmates . . . (pp. 43-44)

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And of course Beddoes is also adapting that moment in Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," when, during the speaker’s boyhood, it scarce "seemed a vision" to outstrip "the skiey speed"33 of his elemental companion. Using the frame of the Ptolemaic universe, and charting a hierarchical gradation from terrestrial base to heavenly superstructure, Beddoes presents the palace as a microcosm of that system on the one hand, and, on the other, as a macrocosm of Balthasar the man. Just as Herbert figures Sunday with its head in celestial clouds ("The other dayes and thou / Make up one man; whose face thou art, / Knocking at heaven with thy brow:"34), so the palace tower represents his divine aspirations, for there, à la Adam in Eden, he enjoys nightly encounters with his deity: From the roof of his tower he talks to Jove, As the god enthroned sits above; Night roosts upon his turret's height, And the sun is the clasp of its girdle of light; And the stars upon his terrace dwell,—

Perpetual light (figurative enlightenment) irradiates the palace. The "magic sun of diamond" fastening a belt of radiance brings Vaughan to mind ("I saw Eternity the other night / Like a great Ring of pure and endless light"35), while the free traffic of stars upon the terrace (one isn't sure whether these be real or the constructs of Balthasar's orrery) recall the blurred cosmic boundaries of Herbert's "Whitsunday": "That th' earth did like a heav'n appeare; / The starres were coming down to know / If they might mend their wages, and serve here" (p. 59). Even Night, more usually a metaphor for ignorance (as in The Dunciad) becomes the vector of enlightenment, her bird-likeness reminiscent of the Orphic "black-winged Night, a goddess of whom even Zeus stands in awe," and who "laid a silver egg in the womb of Darkness" (Graves, p. 30). A stark adversative ushers in the underside of this superficial enlightenment—"But the roots of that tower are fixed in hell"—the foundations of the edifice representing the downward gaze of humankind toward the animals: What would this Man? Now upward will he soar, And little less than Angel, would be more; Now looking downwards, just as griev'd appears To want the strength of bulls, the fur of bears.36

The glamorous palace of Balthasar, enclosing its master, has as its centre his envelope of flesh, and at the heart of that in turn, a soul that Beddoes equates with "a curse and a sin" in a broadly damning complement:

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Chapter Four But the roots of that tower are fixed in hell. Balthasar's soul is a curse and a sin, And nothing is human that dwells within, But tender, beauteous love, That grows upon his haunted heart, Like a scented bloom on a madhouse wall; For amid the wrath and roar of all, It gathers life with blessed art, And calmly blossoms on above.

This dramatizes the king's love of his wife as something discrete and external and, since the flower's roots find limited nourishment from their wall, with only a fragile purchase on life. The metaphor also suggests remoteness from the mainstream of being, the inaccessible flower, though coveted by the maelstrom of madmen below, unable to calm them by the silent envelope of its perfection. If Beddoes's acquaintance with German literature predated his journey to Göttingen, one could here posit the influence of Heinrich von Ofterdingen, in which an out-of-reach bloom also images the unattainable: "Was ihn aber mit voller Macht anzog, war eine hohe, lichtblaue Blume"37 [What struck him most acutely was an exalted light blue flower]. Sabra, her appearance cued by the "flos intactus" of her husband's love, now enters the narrative. The avatar of Emily and her consoeurs in "The Improvisatore," she is fashioned by Beddoes from standard romance formulae. He words them as beautifully ever, but, as so often in the earlier poems, the fragmentary physical metonyms fail to produce a characterful presence. Sabra figures primarily as a disconnected assemblage of eyes, dimple and lips, not unlike the vague feminine presences in Keats's early verse: "O let me lead her gently o'er the brook, / Watch her half-smiling lips, and downward look; / O let me for one moment touch her wrist; / Let me one moment to her breathing list" (p. 5): Bright Sabra, when thy thoughts are seen Moving within those azure eyes, Like spirits in a star at e'en; And when that little dimple flies, As air upon a rosy bush, To hide behind thy fluttering blush; When kisses those rich lips unclose, And love's own music from them flows,— A god might love—a demon does.

It's difficult to infer the woman's virtue from merely decorative surfaces, and this is a function, no doubt, of the poet's limited experience of the sex.

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He further attenuates Sabra's presence by the impossible attempt at visualizing the invisible ("thy thoughts are seen"), and the vagueness of his simile ("Like spirits in a star at e'en"), which seems to have originated in Plato’s Timaeus. The same epistemological uncertainty obtains when Beddoes likens the movement of a dimple to an intangible movement of air. Still, one wouldn't wish these perceptual puzzles away, integral as they are to the half-abstract, half-concrete habit of his imagination. Fascinated as he was by hypnagogic experience, he plundered that liminal state of consciousness for some of his richest bizarreries, and recorded the transition more than once in his verse. Compare, for example, the halfopened eyes in "Albert and Emily": "Her eyes were but half open, yet out peeped / Two starry balls in watery radiance steeped / Between the fringed lids" (p. 17): While the tremulous lid of each discloses A narrow streak of the living eye; As when a beetle, afloat in the sun, On a rocking leaf, has just begun To sever the clasp of his outer wing, So lightly, that you scarce can see His little lace pinions' delicate fold, And a line of his body of breathing gold, Girt with many a panting ring, Before it quivers, and shuts again, Like a smothered regret in the breast of men, Or a sigh on the lips of chastity. (pp. 61-62)

Always recycling his repertoire of favoured images, Beddoes recurs here to discrepant textures of a beetle's glossy elytra and the filmy wings that fold up beneath them—a contrast already explored in the quatorzain called "Another." He documents the contrast even more lovingly here, notwithstanding the fact that the ecphrasis does nothing to advance either narrative or characterization. These accordingly sink into abeyance while he spins out his description. Of note are the prolepsis of "afloat in the sun," presented to the reader before the creature becomes airborne, and the mimetic uncertainty that arises from our efforts to square its floating with the rocking the leaf from which it’s preparing to launch itself. Beddoes lards on maniera, the insect's body turned by a (literally) aureate style into "living gold" (one thinks the "vegetable Gold"31 in Book IV of Paradise Lost), while its sclerites and tergites have been transformed (and gilded) almost out of recognition as "many a panting ring." Behind all the Spenserian artifice, however, lies a scrupulously attentive observation, the legacy of the senior Beddoes's biology lessons. How many Romantic poets

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would have known that the spiracles of an insect's abdomen are part of its breathing apparatus? Beddoes caps his minutiae with two moralizing similes, didactic afterthoughts thrown in, no doubt, to "justify" what he senses to have been an unmotivated divagation, and once again testifying to the influence of early Keats (a comparable moment from "Sleep and Poetry" showing how long the Augustan paysage moralisé took to fade away): The while they cool themselves, they freshness give, And moisture, that the bowery green may live: So keeping up an interchange of favours, Like good men in the truth of their behaviours.32

Having lingered exhaustively over a beetle poised for flight, Beddoes offers the same to courtesy to Sabra, and the narrative once again stalls in an elaborate (but partial) blazon of her charms: One bright hand, dawning through her hair, Bids it be black, itself as fair As the cold moon's palest daughter, The last dim star with doubtful ray Snow-like melting into day, Echoed to the eye on water; Round his neck and on his breast The other curls, and bends its bell Petalled inward, as it fell, Like a tented flower at rest.

Availing himself of Petrarchan extravagance, Beddoes has Sabra's blond hair darken in contrast to the eclipsing brilliance of her white skin, and then subjects that whiteness to a process of perpetual refinement, each stage of the comparison becoming further and further displaced from its predecessor. A half-glimpse the moon (its pallor serving to strip the star of its brilliance) yields to a star at the point of extinction in the dawn, and if that weren't rarefaction enough, even that vestige of light reaches us as a mere reflection in water. Scrim after scrim has been lowered over the object to hand, and by the time we arrive at the epistemic reduction of Sabra's whiteness to the shadow of a shadow, it's a mere glimmering phantasm. Most poets use similes to intensify; it's rare to find one refining away the sensation that he is attempting to evoke. Recalling the pendant lily of the exordium ("When the forgotten goddess hung"), Beddoes now relates the gathered fingers of Sabra's other hand to a shut flower, its claustral tent echoed by the crooking of the arm

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around her husband's neck. This protective gesture reverses the traditional gender roles, and looks ahead to her heroic act of redemption. His tears recall the "piteous" and "lustrous dew" of the proem—a purely decorative correlation, for there’s no reason why Balthasar should be crying in his sleep. But by having Sabra brush "off the dews that lie / Upon its lash's tip," Beddoes strikes a chord with Gray's "Elegy" ("Brushing with hasty steps the dews away"33) and hints at the unhappy events in the offing: And she turns to clasp her sleeping lover Kissing the lid of his tender eye, And brushing off the dews that lie Upon its lash's tip; And now she stirs no more— But the thoughts of her breast are still, As the song of a frozen rill Which winter spreads his dark roof o'er. (p. 62)

Beddoes has punctuated this passage with great originality—or appears to have. One hesitates to elaborate on what might after all be a typographical error, like the one that burned the fingers of F. O. Matthiessen whom, we are told, "would not have lavished so much admiration on what he took to be the concordia discors of the 'soiled fish' image in Whitejacket (Chapter XCII) had he known that 'soiled' was a printer's error for the 'coiled' that Melville had written."34 Be that as it may, while the comma after "still" half disrupts the simile's act of connection, it doesn’t quite sever the nexus between "still" and "frozen," and one expects the verb and adjective to be repeated ("as the song of a frozen rill [is still]"). However, it isn't, and the comparison ends notionally with the stream's freezing, since no full stop follows "o'er." This conscious or accidental omission issues in curiously fluid syntax. The adverbial phrase "In the still and moony hour" can attach itself either to the freezing rill (the "dark roof" of ice redefined as the "dark roof" of the winter sky), or it can establish the point at which the plague arrives. By dissolving the sentences into each other, Beddoes seems to associate the plague with Sabra herself, since the frozen rill initially characterizes the quieting of her thoughts, into which, in the absence of a full stop after "dark roof o'er," the "black, malignant power" enters. This impression is partly supported by the fact that it originates in the "vision-land of death and birth," which seems at first to suggest a hypnagogic zone between consciousness and oblivion, but which, on inspection, turns out to be the sea. "Utmost" in "From the utmost tombs of earth" must be given a benthic force, for there can be no possibility of a finite limit on the circular latitudes of the globe. This reading is confirmed

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by "desert deep," though not before one reads "desert" in the "Libyan" sense, and momentarily thinks about djinns in the sandy waste. Such persisted semantic revisions and gropings after certainty help reflect the turbid thought processes of Balthasar (even though Beddoes relays them to us outside the monarch's consciousness) and give a proleptic glimpse of his conduct toward Sabra once she has taken the disfigurement of the plague upon herself. Beddoes signalizes the advent of the spectre with an archaic proemial conjunction ("And it is Plague"), setting off echoes with the King James Bible where similar kinds of parataxis often prevail, as in, for example, II Sam 18.18: "and he called the pillar after his own name: and it is called to this day, Absalom's place." By suppressing the article before "Plague," he turns it into an apocalyptic personification, encompassing a fuller range of misery than that of a particular disease, and he also enhances the ritual tone with appositive phrases ("the spotted fiend, the drunkard of the tomb"), parodying the grateful incantations of a litany. Equally archaic are the fourteeners that thicken the waist of the poem at this point, for the trimeter that intermits the six lurching heptameters serves only to highlight their clumsiness: And it is Plague, the spotted fiend, the drunkard of the tomb, Upon her mildewed temples the thunderbolts of doom, And blight-buds of hell's red fire, like gory wounds in bloom, Are twisted for a wreath; And there's a chalice in her hand, whence bloody flashes gleam, While struggling snakes with arrowy tongues twist o'er it for a steam, And its liquor is of Phlegethon, and Aetna's wrathful stream, And icy dews of death. (p. 62)

The presentment of Plague recalls the destructive angel in Rev. 14— 19 And the angel thrust his sickle into the earth, and gathered the vine of the earth, and cast it into the great wine-press of the wrath of God. 20 And the winepress was trodden without the city, and blood came out of the winepress, even unto the horse-bridles, by the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs.

—which Beddoes compounds with the traditional image of Bacchus, his grape-and-ivy wreath not only rendered unwholesome through its proximity to Plague's "mildewed" temples (the rottenness of botrytis, as it were) but itself pictured half-visually, half-intangibly as sporting coals of hellfire rather than fruit. These, read against the pale forehead, evoke the crown of thorns in Christian iconology ("like gory wounds in bloom"), the

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simile retorting upon itself by redefining wounds in vegetable terms. Notwithstanding the fact that Swinburne described the dialogue in Death's Jest-Book as "howls of madmen trying to out-stun one another,"35 he himself seems to have gone to school on Beddoes's verse. Compare, for example, a line from "Ex-Voto" ("made drunk with death as wine"36) with the conception here of Plague as "the drunkard of the tomb." Hagiographic legend tells us that John the Evangelist was "tortured by Emperor Domitian, who . . . tried to kill him with a cup of poisoned wine," whereupon "the poison evaporated from the wine in the form of a snake"37—clearly the source of the chalice in which "struggling snakes with arrowy tongues twist o'er it for a steam." That is concrete enough, but Beddoes often plunges us into a world of irreconcilable physical experiences. Unable to imagine a wreath of thunderbolts in material terms, our minds necessarily leave that part of the image abstract and unfocussed, rather like the blurry patch that media footage superposes on faces to blot out their identity. Furthermore, even though Petrarchan extravagance has familiarized us with"living deaths, deare wounds, faire stormes, and freesing fires"38 (Sidney's satiric catalogue), it's easier to conceive those paradoxes as inner experiential data than to try and visualize a cup that simultaneously overflows with lava and icy dew. These haunting derangements of experience find their parallel in the poet's cavalier treatment of time. Plague arrives and vanishes in a compressed tetrameter couplet and a half ("Like a rapid dream she came, / And vanished like the flame / Of a burning ship at sea"), a comet-like roar at odds with the protraction of her demonic communion rite—"But to his shrinking lips she pressed / The cup of boiling misery"—where the slow motion of the two present participles, moving in contrary motion, echo the "burning" of the previous line. Beddoes has here elaborated on a datum from Dio's Roman History 40.27 ("And the Parthians, as some say, poured molten gold into his [Crassus'] mouth in mockery"39), though the recurrence of boiling fluid later on in the passage ("And boiled and bubbled o'er his brain"), recalling as it does the chant in Macbeth 4.11.9 ("Like a hell-broth boil and bubble"), spoils an otherwise impressive passage with infantine witchcraft. He has masterfully evoked Balthasar's hypnagogic state, the gradations of awareness supervening like screens between the subject and the objective reality he senses beyond them. The very act of awaking into lunacy represents just such a screen, madness subsisting at an epistemic remove from the real: And he quaffed it in his tortured rest, And woke in pangs of lunacy. As a buried soul awaking

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Chapter Four From the cycle of its sleep, Panic-struck and sad doth lie Beneath its mind's dim canopy, And marks the stars of memory breaking From 'neath oblivion's ebbing deep. While clouds of doubt bewilder the true sky,— So in the hieroglyphic portal Of his dreams sate Balthasar, Awake amidst his slumbering senses, And felt as feels man's ghost immortal, Whom the corpse's earthen fences From his vast existence bar.

Here Beddoes has reworked an age-old topos connecting sleep and death (instanced in Herbert's claim that "boyes . . . step into their voluntarie graves"40 when they go to bed, and in Keats's idea of sleep as the "soft embalmer of the still midnight"—p. 368), but he inverts it and wakes the "buried" soul to a pseudo-resurrection. Its panic as it tries to orient itself gives a sinister turn to the "burial," and suggests the claustrophobic enclosure of a living man within a grave. Richard Wilbur, who did homage to Beddoes by contrafacting one of his strophic designs ("Two Songs in a Stanza of Beddoes'") might well have found inspiration here for "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World," a poem that also traces the process of hypnagogic adjustment, albeit as a reluctant descent from exaltation rather than ascent into resurrection: "The soul descends once more in bitter love / To accept the waking body."41 This part of "The Romance of the Lily" illustrates once again the liminal nature of Beddoes’s symbolism, symbolism that ultimately defies translation into strictly logical or visual terms. Someone waking from a deep sleep in the early nineteenth century would first set eyes on the canopy of his bedstead, or, in the context of a burial, on a funereal baldaquin above the open grave. But when stars break through it, we realize that it’s in fact the open sky—which would indeed be a legitimate first datum of consciousness for someone awaking from a sleep in an open field. But we aren’t dealing with concrete experience. The whole sequence amounts to an allegory of consciousness, the stars equating with memory, and orienting the sleeper in the same way that constellations orient a navigator. Memory thus plots a course through the inchoate experiences that crowd upon us in a hypnagogic state. At the same time, however, Beddoes transposes the navigable sea on to the sky we steer by— "oblivion's ebbing deep"—an inversion that issues in another derangement. Just as clouds can obscure the stars as recognizable points of reference, so in this nonce allegory, they represent besetting doubts that

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further befuddle our waking moments, especially since the "true sky" presents itself as "the sky of truth" (as opposed to the actual sky that the metaphoric construct has displaced from view). Having woken "in the pangs of lunacy," an inner core of Balthasar’s consciousness registers that out-of-body detachment associated with religious ecstasy. One hears a faint echo of Keats's regret over the "dull brain" that "perplexes and retards" (p. 208) in the enclosure of "man's immortal ghost" in "the corpse's earthen fences," the prolepsis of "corpse" also recalling the way the speaker in the "Ode to a Nightingale" becomes a sod to the requiem of a bird. Since Balthasar seems to register the presence of the plague, he must also be aware of Sabra's self-immolation and the healing it will bring. The passage suggests that Beddoes observed rapideye-movement sleep long before its official discovery in the 1950s, the mobility of the subject’s eyes sockets like the straining of leashed animals. But when he suggests their rheumy exudations are poisonous, observation yields to rampant melodrama. One of the poet's shortcomings is to strain too hard for effects of energy and afflatus (a fault also noticeable at several points of The Improvisatore): The pestilence was in his breast, And boiled and bubbled o'er his brain, His thoughtless eyes in their unrest Would have burst their circling chain, Scattering their fiery venom wide, But for the soft endearing rain, With which the trembler at his side Fed those gushing orbs of white, As evening feeds the waves with looks of quiet light.

The unwarranted force of "gush" spoils the otherwise arresting effect of contrary motion: Sabra's tears fall down upon the rising "poison" of the rheum and so titrate a calming antidote. One senses here the lurking presence of Collins's "Sonnet," the unusual noun "trembler" recalling the lines "Strange that thy peace, thou trembler, flies / Before a rising tear"), while the alignment of tears and waves ("Fed those gushing orbs of white, / As evening feeds the waves with looks of quiet light") evoke its Venus Anadyomene climax ("Thus issued from a teeming wave / The fabled queen of love"42). Sabra's antidote proves equal to the oceanic compass of the ill she cures, and a blazon of healthful symptoms measures the extent of her self-immolation, each item irrevocably surrendered by the surrogate victim who "will need them now" ("need" here retaining its archaic sense of "lack"):

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Chapter Four The tear upon his cheek's fierce flush; The cool breath on his brow; And the healthy presage of a blush, Sketched in faint tints behind his skin; And the hush of settling thoughts within, Sabra hath given, and she will need them now.

Euripides' Alcestis would have provided Beddoes with the idea of a wife's vicarious sacrifice of life to a spouse, but he also would have found it reinforced by one of Jesus' aphorisms: "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" (John 15.13). Alcestis surrenders her life, whereas Sabra gives up only her health and beauty in a species of blood transfusion, a topical issue to which Beddoes, as the son of a cutting-edge doctor, would certainly have been alert. (In 1818, James Blundell had transfused blood from a husband into the veins of his wife.) Needless to say, Balthasar responds to the self-immolation in an ignoble way. Euripides' Admetus feels an access of grief—"And we who love you are heartbroken; most of all, I and these children who are weeping with me. . . . For me / Living and dying are in you alone. / Your love claims more than love: I worship you!"43—but the sight of Sabra's depleted beauty prompts her consort to thoughts of murder. Beddoes bases her physical decay on Ovid's account of Echo, but with one important difference, viz, the fact that the nymph's disfigurement springs from sleepless pining rather than from self-immolating benevolence: et tenuant vigiles corpus miserabile curae Adducitque cutem macies et in aera sucus Corporis omnis abit; [her sleepless cares waste away her wretched form; she becomes gaunt and wrinkled and all moisture fades from her body into the air.]44

Even so, the parallel between the two passages calls attention to itself: For, as the echo of a grove Keeps its dim shadow 'neath some song of love, And gives her life away to it in sound, Soft spreading her wild harmony, Like a tress of smoking censery, Or a ring of water round,— So all the flowery wealth Of her happiness and health Untwined from Sabra's strength, and grew Into the blasted stem of Balthasar's pale life,

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And his is the beauty and bliss that flew On the wings of her love from his sinking wife. (p. 63)

Here the feminine personification of the echo all but confers the upper case upon the E, helping to correlate Narcissus' cold self-absorption with the Libyan king's. The echo enriches the experience of the grove not only with its individual timbre but also because it turns a homophonic utterance into a canon ("wild harmony"), the generous transfusion of sound issuing in its own extinction. Two additional similes support this representation of Sabra's vicarious suppletion of her husband's life, a fuming thurible and a ripple ("Like a tress of smoking censery, / Or a ring of water round"). The OED defines "censery" as "incense," and, citing only this instance from Beddoes, pronounces it "rare." However, it seems clear that Beddoes has modelled his neologism on the antique "psaltery," and that if we are to avoid the tautology of "smoking smoke," we must view the censery as the receptacle from which it issues, just as a psaltery gives forth music. This is the hinge that allows the simile to attach to the self-renewing echo of the grove on the one hand (an incense plume cannot regenerate once dissipated), and, on the other, the endless reduplication of ripples ("ring") in a pond ("water round"). By presenting "round" as a metonymic noun that defines the shape of the pool and "water" as an adjective, the poet similarly avoids the tautology of a round ripple. The containing pond produces its ripples in the same way that the thurible releases its fumes. At the same time, however, those images of self-renewing enrichment counterpoint the depletion of Sabra's life as she transfers her energy into her husband. Beddoes contrasts the physical engagement with his person ("that calm entwining sleep"—p. 62) with an intangible inward unravelling: "all the flowery wealth / Of her happiness and health / Untwined from Sabra's strength." Proleptic irony links that loss of vitality with her watery death through the participle "sinking"—"And his is the beauty and bliss that flew / On the wings of her love from his sinking wife"—and irony also attaches to the image of candlelight on a funerary statue, an image at odds with her unceremonious murder and lack of formal interment. Beddoes has forgotten his Libyan setting for a moment, and taken us into cathedral naves with dim sepulchral sculptures. The faintness of Sabra's life force finds an echo in the epistemological remove that registers a dying flame (already weak) by its reflection (weaker still) on a marble effigy. A couplet from Pope's "Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady" probably contributed to the idea: "Dim lights of life that burn a length of years, / Useless, unseen, as lamps in sepulchres."45 Beddoes then measures the husband's alienation from his wife with a rhetorical question ("And

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what is a woman to Balthasar, / Whom love has weakened, bowed and broken?") that de-individuates her into a generic entity. Memories of Shelley's desert tyrant also enter the picture, "His lip's curled meaning, yet unspoken, / The lowering of his wrinkled brow" an echo of Ozymandias' "frown, / And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command."46 Similarly the participial "graved" in "'Tis graved" does partial homage to the word "stamped" in the same sonnet, and also has the proleptic force of a candlelit statue, evoking ideas of formal burial even though the narrative in fact plunges Sabra into the whelming tides that so discomposed Milton in "Lycidas," or the horror of a marine "mort sans tombeau"47 that Scribe laid bare in the ballad from L'Africaine. It's typical of Beddoes's habit of extremity that the physical revulsion of the husband from his wife should issue at once in thoughts of murder (though history offers instances enough, as witness the conduct of Henry VIII). He story-boards this development through a set of disconnected tableaux, and, doubtless remembering Nero's attempt at killing his mother by shipwreck, puts husband and wife to sea on an apparent pleasure trip. The boat's crescent shape ("ocean-moon") moves through the dark water in tandem with real moon in the sky above, while another sort of symmetry obtains in the redefinition of midnight as a nocturnal noon. Compare this conceit from Ruddigore: "the dead of the night's high-noon"48 Since it’s highly improbable for a pleasure jaunt to take place on a stormy sea at the middle of the night, these details reveal the real purpose behind the excursion, viz, the noyade of the queen: Along the sea, at night's black noon, Alone the king and lady float, With music in a snowy boat, That glides in light, an ocean-moon; From billow to billow it dances, And the spray around it glances, And the mimic rocks and caves Beneath the mountains of the waves, Reflect a joyous song As the merry bark is borne along; (p.64)

Who produces this "joyous song"? Far from being a barge with attendant musicians (who would have thus witnessed the crime), the boat can contain only the couple, and since we can't plausibly imagine Balthasar with the rudder in one hand and a theorbo in the other, we assume that Sabra herself is singing the barcarole, an ironic note of festivity like the doom-laden propemptikon in "The Bard":

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"Fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr/ blows, "While proudly riding o'er the azure realm "In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes; "Youth on the prow and Pleasure at the helm; "Regardless of the sweeping whirlwind's sway, "That, hushed in grim repose, expects his evening-prey.["]49

Just such an atmosphere of exhilaration attends the progress of Balthasar's craft, and the seascape configures itself upon its presence. "Mimic" correlates the undulation of the submarine rocks with the undulation of surface waves, the lineal echo matching these unrelated items in the same way that Hokusai introduces Mount Fuji as a static analogue to the billow hisGreat Wave off Kanagawa. However, there is also an aural dimension to "mimic," recalling as it does the cross-referenced sound waves of Pope's "Autumn" ("Thro' Rocks and Caves the Name of Delia sounds, / Delia, each Cave and echoing Rock rebounds"—p. 134), notwithstanding the fact echoes can’t travel between air and water. The "dark sepulchral vale," by bringing to mind "valley of the shadow of death" (Psalm 23.4), darkens the tone, and intimates Balthasar's deadly intent: And now it stays its eager sail Within a dark sepulchral vale, Amid the living Alps of Ocean, Round which the crags in tumult rise And make a fragment of the skies; Beneath whose precipice's motion The folded dragons of the deep Lie with lidless eyes asleep:

Here Beddoes supplies an additional touch of maniera (at once menacing and decorative) in the dragons, which offer a chinoiserie paraphrase of the Kraken. That the poet has made an advance upon the grand guignol moments of The Improvisatore is attested by the way in which Sabra's murder transpires between the lines: It pauses; and—Is that a shriek That agonizes the still air, And makes the dead day move and speak From beneath its midnight pall,— Or the ruined billow's fall?

The speaker seems about to embark on a narrative that will unroll its matter clause by clause, but leaves a conjunction dangling when, as it were

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overtaken by events, he must make sense of a disruptive scream. Hamlet 4.1.44 talks about the "woundless air," but Beddoes's medium seems more vulnerable, its molecules forced apart by a noise so horrifying indeed that it re-animates the vanished day, now a notional corpse beneath the ocean waves. "Agonize" again points to the influence of "The Bard," which offstages the death of Edward II a similar way: "Mark the year, and mark the night, "When Severn shall re-echo with affright "The shrieks of death, thro' Berkeley's roofs that ring, "Shrieks of an agonizing King!["] (pp. 189-90)

If Sabra had indeed been responsible for the "joyous song," its silencing becomes all the more poignant, especially when Beddoes recapitulates the "ocean-moon" kenning in another key: "That night the water-crescent bore / Dark Balthasar alone unto the living shore." By applying this epithet to the barren Libyan coast, Beddoes evokes the habitable margins of "Bright Star"—"The moving waters at their priestlike task / Of pure ablution round earth's human shores" (p. 372)—but also invests the opposing coast of Sicily with antithetic associations of death, momentarily redefining Balthasar as Charon. His indirections generate a pathos that the ornamental maniera of the tableau partly undermines, the sheer decorativeness of "water-crescent" looking ahead to the fin de siècle fantasias on the Salome motif by Klimt and Wilde, their self-conscious patterning a virtual guarantor of shallowness because they redirect our response from tragedy, properly concerned with depths, to the intricate fabrication of a surface. Beddoes interposes an intermezzo after the death of Sabra, which, like many operatic intermezzi (and like the intermezzo in To the Lighthouse), partly measures the passage of time, and also serves a choric function, allowing the speaker to step out of his role as narrator and into that of praise-singer. Taking the form of a metafictive threnody, the interlude borrows a note of impassioned afflatus from Shelley's "Adonais" ("I weep for Adonais—he is dead! / Oh weep for Adonais"50): Tears, tears for Sabra; who will weep? O blossoms, ye have dew, And grief-dissembling storms might strew Thick-dropping woe upon her sleep. (p. 65)

Beddoes registers the heightened emotion by means of epizeuxis, the repetition of "tears" suggesting a convulsive sob between the two words. In the same way that Keats undertakes privately to compensate Psyche for

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her lack of public cultus ("So let me be thy choir, and make a moan / Upon the midnight hours; / Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet"—p. 212), so the speaker resolves to provide an elegy because the husband can’t and won’t. In the absence of a formal, public ceremony, he invokes nature to discharge the rituals of grief as Milton does in "Lycidas": Ye valleys low where the mild whispers use Of shades and wanton winds and gushing brooks, On whose fresh lap the swart Star sparely looks, Throw hither all your quaint enamell'd eyes, That on the green turf suck the honied showers,51

In Beddoes's case, however, such gestures seem ineffectual, the droplets of dew dwarfed by the sea that entombs Sabra, and the storms a reduced version of the cosmic grief that registers the fall in Paradise Lost ("Sky low'r'd, and muttering Thunder, some sad drops / Wept at completing of the mortal Sin Original"—p. 401). Furthermore, the grieving he urges on nature remains potential and subjunctive; we never learn if the blossoms do indeed shed their dew for the queen. Instead of offering the concerted symphonies of grief of "Lycidas" and "Adonais," nature here shrugs off the death in a proto-Audenic way: "everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster."52 Beddoes reproaches the sea for its indifference, anticipating Tennyson's indifferent ocean and private grief ("Break, break, break, / On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!"53), and looking back to the elegiac improperia of "Lycidas" ("Where were ye Nymphs when the remorseless deep / Clos'd o'er the head of your lov'd Lycidas?"—p. 121) and "Adonais" ("Where wert thou, mighty Mother, when he lay, / When thy Son lay, pierced by the shaft which flies / In darkness?"—p. 485): False sea, why dost thou look like sorrow, Why is thy cold heart of water? Or rather, why are tears of thee, Compassionless, bad sea? (p. 65)

The cold sufficiency of inclusio seals his reproach into a capsule of matching vocatives ("False sea"; "bad sea"), while the dissonant sunshine proves (if proof were needed) nature's supreme indifference to the issues in hand: Heaven, blue heaven, thou art not kind, Or else the sun is not thine eye, For thou should'st be with weeping blind,

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Chapter Four Not thus forgetful, bright and dry.

Here the epanorthosis, slotting in a crucial adjective the second time round, draws attention to the discordance of that "blue." Beddoes deconstructs the extravagance to which romance diction is prone, for in a world of unreflecting absolutes that conceives Sabra as "beauty's fairest daughter" one would have expected the same cosmic knock-on from her death that we find in the "Nocturnal Upon S Lucy's Day": The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk, Whither, as to the bed's-feet, life is shrunk, Dead and interr'd; yet all these seem to laugh, Compared with me, who am their epitaph.54

The blue sea and shining sun in fact offer themselves as the antitype of the rocks in The Franklin's Tale: But, Lord, thise grisly feendly rokkes blake, That semen rather a foul confusion Of werk than any fair creacion Of swich a parfit wys God and a stable, Why han ye wroght this werk unresonable?55

Dorigen's planctus centres on the presence of fiendishness in an otherwise fair creation; Beddoes's on fairness in otherwise fiendish circumstances. The speaker tries to ready himself for the task of elegy by borrowing the optative formulations of the "Ode to the West Wind" ("If I were a dead leaf though mightest bear / If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee"—p. 617) and also recalling Hamlet's plea for dissolution ("O, that this too too sullied flesh would melt / Thaw and resolve itself into a dew"—1.2.12930): Oh that I were a plume of snow, To melt away and die In a long chain of bubbling harmony!—

This conveys a loss of human identity and an absorption into a vaster medium in the manner of Wordsworth's "Lucy" dirge ("Rolled round in earth's diurnal course, / With rocks, and stones, and trees"56). The plume of snow, in addition to signifying the act of transcription, also evokes the black feathers of Regency funeral apparatus, miniaturized and redrawn in virginal white. Furthermore, a bubble-track charts the course of a drowning figure as it sinks to its death. This might well have prompted a

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passage in Hood's "Hero and Leander," where a death registers in similar terms: Down and still downward through the dusky green She bore her treasure, with a face too nigh To mark how life was alter'd in its mien, Or how the light grew torpid in his eye, Or how his pearly breath unprison'd there, Flew up to join the universal air.57

An aposiopesis evokes the incoherence of grief, the dash after "harmony" suggesting a jotted thought incapable of being developed, and the one after "woe" ushering in an incoherent imperative that highlights the discontinuity between a cuplet of tears and the engulfing sea ("A cup of the vale-lily bloom / Filled with white and liquid woe— / Give it to her ocean-pall"). The extravagance reminds us of Cleveland's threnody for Edward King ("I am no Poet here; my pen's the spout / Where the rainewater of mine eyes run out"58). Invoking the seeding myth of the Venus Anadyomene ("Some hold she sprang from the foam with gathered about the genitals of Uranus, when Cronus threw them into the sea"59), Beddoes sows a small lament to reap from it a torrential paean: With such deluge-seeds I'll sow Her mighty elemental tomb, Until the lamentations grow Into a foaming crop of populous overflow.

The irresistibility of its growth registers not only in the impatient enjambement but also in the sprawling Alexandrine made half ungovernable by the anapaest ("ulous o") that bulges out of its confines. The intermezzo having served its purpose of narrative elision, Beddoes now fast-forwards to the death of Balthasar, giving no indication of the length of time that has elapsed since the murder, though the perfect tense of "Heaven has said a fearful word" requires the narrative to resume shortly after that pronouncement: Hither like a bird of prey, Whom red anticipations feed, Flaming along the fearful day Revenge's thirsty hour doth fly Heaven has said a fearful word: (Which hell's eternal labyrinths heard, And the wave of time Shall answer to the depths sublime,

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Chapter Four Reflecting it in deed;) 'Balthasar the king must die.'

We possibly glimpse Prometheus' punitive vulture in that "bird of prey," for Balthasar has also challenged Olympus in his self-deifying quest for knowledge; but whatever the raptor in hand, the abstractness of"anticipations" half neutralizes the graphic "red" of its blood-dabbled beak and talons. The brilliance of the plumage, catching the sun as the bird races forward, leaves us wondering if the "fearful" day be objectively fearful in the manner of the "dies irae," or whether Balthasar subjectively cowers upon its arrival. "Fearful" becomes unquestionably objective, however, when coupled with "word," which echoes through hell in a programmatically crabbed and labyrinthine phrasing. How, for example, does one construe that "wave of time"? The inexorable prosecution of poetic justice? And if so, what part does hell play in that process, since time answers immediately to its "depths sublime." Beddoes seems to hint that because heaven and hell are interinvolved as spaces of reward and deprivation, the inferno becomes the contractual repository of all the punishments—disease and mortality— that heaven imposes on the world ("Reflecting it in deed"). That vicious symbiosis creates a deconstructive ambiguity in the syntax. "In deed" coalesces into an intensifying adverb ("indeed"), and shows heaven for what it is—the arbitrary and despotic mirror image of its hellish antitype. After that tortuous build-up, the "fearful word" stands forth in all the unnegotiable starkness of its mandate: "Balthasar the king must die." Beddoes dismantles his potency and wide-ranging knowledge ("He hath read the sun, he hath read the moon") at a stroke, bundling it up into unrecoverable past participles as in Gray's "Ode on the Spring" ("On hasty wings thy youth is flown; / Thy sun is set, thy spring is gone"—p.53): 'Balthasar the king must die.' Must die, for all his power is fled, His spells dissolved, his spirits gone,

The ineluctable nature of heaven's edict registers in the anadiplosis that not only repeats the words "must die," but also strips them of their legitimate syntactic anchor. As a result, the sentence becomes as weak and dependent as the subject whose fate it records through an inventory of deficiencies brought on by loss of power. Just as Pope's "Epistle to Cobham" presents the spectator with a "sic transit gloria mundi" tableau— With tape-ty'd curtains, never meant to draw,

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The George and Garter dangling from that bed Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red, Great Villers lies—alas ! how chang'd from him, That life of pleasure, and that soul of whim! (p. 583)

—so Beddoes draws the bedroom curtain on a tyrant in articulo mortis: And magic cannot ease the bed Where lies the necromant alone. What thought is gnawing in his heart, What struggles madly in his brain? See, the force, the fiery pain Of silence makes his eyeballs start.

Recalling the questions by which Keats had interrogated the mysteries of his Grecian urn—"What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? / What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy" (p. 209)—the poet presents a Balthasar inscrutable in death as in life: "What thought is gnawing at his heart, / What struggles madly in his brain?" We view him as Pope had viewed Villiers, the "ecce" of disclosure holding up the dying subject as the exemplar of an evil life. The tension of his unconfessed crimes ("the fiery pain / Of silence makes his eyeballs start") takes us back to the moment when he fell victim the plague, the moment that prompted Sabra's self-immolation, and, with that, her eventual murder: "His thoughtless eyes in their unrest / Would have burst their circling chain" (p. 63). At this point another voice enters the poem, reading at first like a selfdirected authorial imperative that urges compassion for his tortured creation. However, notwithstanding the absence of inverted commas, it turns out to be the urging of a bedside counsellor: O ease thy bosom, dare to tell— But grey-haired pity speaks in vain; That bitter shriek, that hopeless yell, Has given the secret safe to hell. (p. 66)

Beddoes renders that counsellor in such vague terms that he all but turns into personification of wise old age ("grey-haired pity") not unlike one devised by Collins ("There Honour comes, a pilgrim grey"60), though Beddoes's unfortunate predilection for the word "yell" compromises its dignity. Balthasar's tyranny has produced circumstances similar to those at the end of Macbeth—

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Chapter Four As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, I must not look to have; but in their stead, Curses, not loud, but deep, mouth-honour, breath, Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not. (5.2.25-28)

—but Beddoes evokes instead a tableau of genuine grief, no doubt for the sake of the lyric expatiation that he repeatedly gussets into his narratives: Like a ruffled nightingale, Balanced upon dewy wings, Through the palace weeps the tale, Leaving tears, where'er she sings;

This owes something to Virgil's "Fama" in Book IV of The Aeneid, though it has been paraphrased almost out of recognition: Progenuit, pedibus celerem et pernicibus alis, monstrum horrendum, ingens, cui quot sunt corpore plumae, tot vigiles oculi subter (mirabile dictu), tot linguae, totidem ora sonant, tot subrigit auris. nocte volat caeli medio terraeque per umbram, stridens, nec dulci declinat lumina somno; luce sedet custos aut summi culmine tecti, turribus aut altis, et magnas territat urbes, tam ficti pravique tenax quam nuntia veri. [. . . brought forth last . . ., swift of foot and fleet of wing, a monster awful and huge, who for the many feathers in her body has as many watchful eyes below—wondrous to tell—as many tongues, as many sounding mouths, as many pricked-up ears. By night, midway between heaven and earth, she flies through the gloom, screeching, nor droops her eyes in sweet sleep; by day she sits on guard on high roof-top or lofty turrets, and affrights great cities, clinging to the false and wrong, yet heralding truth.]61

Modifying that grotesque sublime, Beddoes miniaturizes his "Fama" into a nightingale, her ruffled plumage a badge external grief and her "dewy wings" apparently glistening with tears. However, it exists only within the notional frame of simile while the tale itself moves through the palace. In fact, the very motility of rumour has prompted the comparison with a bird, for "weep" by itself is an undynamic verb: "Through the palace weeps the tale." Then the neuter identity of "tale" morphs back into the nightingale when Beddoes slips in a feminine pronoun: "where'er she sings."

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This same habit of unprepared elision and reversion recurs when the announcement of Balthasar's death shifts seamlessly into his burial rites, the one slotted in paratactically beside the other: And, around the icy dead Maids are winding Kingly robes of mocking lead, And with leafy garlands binding The unresisting careless head: Gems are flashing, garments wave Round the bridegroom of the grave.

This kaleidoscopic shimmer derives from a montage of vague and unrelated details. There can be no telling whether the gems and garments flash and wave from the mourners or from the corpse, whether we must construe "round" as the wider circle of mourners or the tighter enclosure of the body within its winding sheet. That is loose enough, but how can one logically reconcile "robes" and "lead" in any terms other than those of a Dali-esque universe in which fixities ooze out of their solid identities like Camembert cheese? Mingling the rites of an epithalamion with those of an exequy, Beddoes arrives at the equally startling epithet "the bridegroom of the grave." Without for a moment suggesting the possibility of influence, one could cross-refer a troparion from the 5th Ode by the Georgian monk John Shauteli. Because Psalm 19.4 figures the sun as "a bridegroom coming out of his chamber," this Orthodox cleric lets Jesus dawn from the tomb ("let us go out to meet Christ as he comes from the grave like a bridegroom"62). And, as another instance of convergent evolution, one could cite a celebrated Victorian hymn: From heaven he came and sought her To be his holy Bride; With his own Blood he bought her, And for her life he died.63

Given these pious pre- and post-echoes in the line, it seems all the more ironical that a sceptical poet should have arrived at the same sort of paradox. The limp form of Jesus in many Depositions seems to have prompted the idea of the "unresisting, careless head" that slumps against the colon—a leaden caesura in the narrative of burial. A more animated kind of interruption, however, marks the re-animation of the corpse: Hark! A shout of wild surprise, A burst of terrible amaze!

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Chapter Four The lids are moving up his eyes, They open, kindle, beam, and gaze— Grave, thy bars are broken, Quenched the flames of pain, Falsely fate hath spoken, The dead is born again.

Here Beddoes parodies the taunt in 1 Cor. 15.55 ("O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?") as Balthasar returns from the grave, that single narrative rib that he removed from Casaubon's True & Faithful Relation to fashion the poem in hand: As when the moon and shadows' strife, On some rebellious night, Looks a pale statue into life, And gives his watching form the action of their light, So stilly strode the awakened one, And with the voice of stone, Which troubled caverns screech, Cursing the tempest's maniac might, He uttered human speech. 'Tremble, living ones, and hear; By the name of death and fear, By lightning, earthquake, fire and war, And him whose snakes and hounds they are, From whose judgment seat I come, Listen, crouch, be dumb.[']

This figures the "resurrection" in distinctly operatic terms. Beddoes has probably remembered the graveyard scene in Don Giovanni, which is also well lit ("bella notte . . . più chiara del giorno"64), but he also harks back to the "marble maid" associated with Sabra's fading health, the corpse’s features animated by "a flame's reflected breath / Shivering in the throes of death" (p. 64). The supporting simile of optical illusion casts doubt upon the reality of the event it evokes, as does the paradoxical adverb "stilly" which suggests both the idea of inactivity (in spite of its application to a striding object) and quietness (notwithstanding the violent noise made by the corpse). Further epistemological doubt arises from the fact that Beddoes never names Balthasar post mortem, choosing rather to render his identity by periphrasis: "icy dead," "the dead" and "the awakened one." He spices this faceless anonymity with hints of the "Ozymandias" inscription, an inscription nothing if not onomatocentric: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"65 Shelley's pharaoh had made his boast in a landscape that mocks its grandiosity, and

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it retorts upon his posthumous, impotent self the "despair" that he wished upon his rivals. But while Beddoes's tyrant also embodies a lesson in humility, he is as much actual the Don Giovanni figure (il dissoluto punito) as he is the retributive statue that drags him to his judgement. He urges the hope of repentance rather than the despair of submission, presenting himself not as the omnipotent mage that once talked "with Jove," but rather as the prophet of a retributive Jehovah, apocalyptically striding the blast as pity strides it in Macbeth, and enjoining the spiritual alarm favoured by such prophets as Isaiah: "Tremble, ye women that are at ease; be troubled, ye careless ones" (32:11-12).Macbeth has also prompted the imagery of torrential blood: My soul is drowned beneath a flood Of conscience, red with Sabra's blood; And from yon blue infinity Doomed and tortured I am sent To confess the deed and fly;

This split-complementary coupling of red and blue is Beddoes’s version of Macbeth's "multitudinous seas" that make "the green one red" (2.2.55–61), just as the drowning of the soul in a crimson tide recalls "I am in blood / Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o'er" (3.4.135-37). Most fire-and-brimstone preaching extends hope to those it terrifies, but the posthumous Balthasar offers a less orthodox resolution. The "living ones," initially enjoined to "Listen, crouch, be dumb," do not rise to embrace the salvation that evangelicals ordinarily predicate on repentance, and the phrasal parallelism, instead of mounting to an ecstatic climax, collapses into death: "Listen, crouch, and die." The galvanized corpse of Balthasar then obeys its own imperatives—"With that word his body fell"—though the cadence immediately gives way to gusty upliftment that dissolves the corpse even before it has hit the ground, the lightning strike and charring superimposed by a syntax so telescopic that it verges on incoherence: With that word his body fell As dust upon the storm, Flashlike darkened was his form; (p. 67)

And so, with the operatic equivalent of one or two thunderous cadences, the romance comes to its abrupt and noisy conclusion: "While through their souls in horror rang / The dragon shout, the thunderous clang / Of the closing gates of hell."

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Being that rara avis, a poem published in Beddoes’s lifetime, "The Romance of the Lily" doesn't carry the "Desunt cetera" appended to the "Fragment" that follows it in Donner's edition. Not that the fragmentary poems necessarily prove defective. Kenneth Clark has pointed out that because much classical "art has come down to us in a fragmentary condition, . . . we have virtuously adapted our taste to this necessity," and "come to think of the fragment as more vivid, more concentrated and more authentic." As a result, unlike our ancestors, we now view the Laocoon with comparative disfavour on account of "its elaborate completeness."1 This applies to Beddoes in some respects, but in others it doesn't. "The Romance of the Lily," though nominally complete, doesn't register as a poem that has been diligently worked through. It has nothing of that excessive polish that, as Tchaikovsky remarked of Mendelssohn, can issue in somewhat repellent smoothness: "the exquisite roundness of his form and the fluidity of his harmonic progressions have been brought to such an ideal purity . . . that, strange to say, they have led to sickly sweetness and to slickness, if one may so call it."2 On the other hand, even a fully-worked Beddoes poem fails to slough all its eccentricities of structure and emphasis—its dwellings on the tangential and its scurryings over central issues—habits that often create a sense of imbalance and misplacement. This amounts to the very reverse of Tchaikovsky's judgement on Mendelssohn, and, in a curious way, gives the fragmentary poems a certain advantage over the somewhat misshapen "finished" products in the Beddoes canon. Reading the "Fragment" in the wake of "The Romance of the Lily," we become all the more aware of deficiencies of that work—its long, divagative proem and its lurching narrative tempo. At the same time, the very incoherence of the fragment enhances its suggestiveness: All night a wind of music, All night a purple sunshine Upon the earth;

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The portal chrystalline Of Paradise, bright Paradise, Where the streams of odour flow, Gently musically slow, Where the blossoms of ambrosia Sparkle with cerulean beam, The portal of that ancient city Stood open on the sea—4

Beddoes begins with an assemblage of floating phrases, and, having just arrived at the apparent certainty of an indicative verb, breaks off without resolution. There is something proto-Imagist about this, for some poetry of the early twentieth century often achieves density and compacture through the attenuation of its verbs. One thinks, for example, of the equative, verbless apposition in Pound's "In a Station of the Metro"—"The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough"3— and of H. D.'s "Sea Rose," a poem even closer approximation to the Beddoes fragment in offering an indicative "resolution" that, even so, remains irresolute: Rose, harsh rose, marred and with stint of petals, meagre flower, thin, sparse of leaf, more precious than a wet rose single on a stem— you are caught in the drift.5

Read in relation to these poems, Beddoes's evocative jottings constitute an Imagist moment avant la lettre. So open-ended is the content that it's impossible to know whether he meant to refer to an earthly or heavenly paradise. Whatever the case, its open door seems to advertise that free commerce between godly and mortal life presented in Herbert's "Whitsunday": Where is that fire which once descended On thy Apostles? thou didst then Keep open house, richly attended, Feasting all comers by twelve chosen men.6

Beddoes’s paradise might be prelapsarian—a glimpse of the Saturnian age—or it might be millenarian like the one brought into being when Prometheus is unbound in Shelley's drama. Parts of it, indeed—"Intensely,

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slowly, solemnly roll on, / Kindling with mingled sounds, and many tones, / Intelligible words and music wild"7; "And the wild odour of the forest flowers, / The music of the living grass and air" (p. 285)—suggest the possibility of influence from that poem, and so for dating the fragment post 1820. Shelley’s triplicate adverbs ("Intensely, slowly, solemnly") look ahead to the unpunctuated doublet ("Gently musically slow") on the one hand, while, on the other, the synaesthetic juxtaposition of "odour" and "music" anticipates the "wind of music" and "streams of odour" that flow from Beddoes’s paradise. Shelley was celebrating the restitution of the old Titanic order and the routing of a tyrant, and it’s possible that Beddoes had some something similar in mind, though we can't be sure. What is certain, however, is the correlation of two different doors. The first would appear to be heavenly and partly immaterial, since crystal isn't be found in masses large enough for the fashioning of earthly structures (notwithstanding the crystal columns that Bertoja painted in the Sala del Bacio), whereas such adunata are the staple of apocalyptic narratives: "The fifth, sardonyx; the sixth, sardius; the seventh, chrysolite; the eighth, beryl; the ninth, a topaz; the tenth, a chrysoprasus; the eleventh, a jacinth; the twelfth, an amethyst" (Rev. 21.22). The music and odours that pour from its gate seem to descend as benedictions, marking, perhaps, the end of a divisive and competitive society that had turned city states into militarized entities. The fact that the "portal of that ancient city / Stood open on the sea" invites cross-reference with a moment in Prometheus Unbound: . . . so the revenge Of the Supreme may sweep through vacant shades, As rainy wind through the abandoned gate Of a fallen palace. (pp. 233-34)

Shelley, however, generates a sense of enforced submission to change, whereas Beddoes’s sense of hospitality and openness seems more akin to the "magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas" (p. 208) in the "Ode to a Nightingale," and the "little town by river or sea shore" (p. 210) in the "Ode on a Grecian Urn." Certainly the absence of inhabitants hints at an enchanted palace such as we find in the tale of Psyche: "She saw nobody at all; the waiters were mere voices, and when someone came in and sang and someone else accompanied him on the lyre, she saw neither of them, nor the lyre either."8 The fragment teases us out of thought because, like Keats's urn, it withholds narrative closure. But even as we make fruitless guesses at its meaning, we can at least relish its sensuous tangibility. The "purple" of

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"purple sunshine" takes some semantic direction from the Latin "purpureus" (with its implication of radiance as well as of colour), but it also gives chromatic presence to the otherwise featureless dark— Beddoes's approximation of a moment in Paradise Lost:"yet from those flames / No light, but rather darkness visible."9Paradoxical sunshine imparts a sense of Mediterranean warmth to the night, and purple tonality contrasts with the points of sky-blue light, the stars pricked upon it (or so I read the "blossoms of ambrosia" that "sparkle with cerulean beam"). Other felicities worth noting are the rapt epanorthosis that almost redundantly restates the brightness of a space that is necessarily bright ("Paradise, bright Paradise") and the imbrication of adverb upon adverb (unless, of course, Beddoes forgot to punctuate the line properly in his haste to set it down). Whatever the cause, the collision of modal properties slows down the tempo as the mind tries to disengage them. In contrast to its free-floating predecessor, the "Lines Written in a Blank Leaf of the 'Prometheus Unbound'" were not only dated and placed by the author (Oxford, 1822), but also have a more exact terminus a quo in Shelley’s death (8 July), given the elegiac preterite with which Beddoes ends the poem ("—and that was SHELLEY"). Its line-count of sixteen and the presence of two distinct positions and a rudimentary volta suggest the lineaments of a rough-hewn, unrhymed sonnet. At the same time, the poem presents itself as a memorial inscription, its advice-to-the-painter topos and its imperative of execution ("Write it in gold") evoking a stone mason poised to make a cartouche for the poet's cenotaph: Write it in gold—a Spirit of the sun, An Intellect ablaze with heavenly thoughts, A Soul with the dews of pathos shining, Odorous with love, and sweet to silent woe With the dark glories of concentrate song, Was sphered in mortal earth. (p. 67)

Because he presents the poem as a lapidary epitaph, Beddoes all but reverses the claim of erecting a "monumentum aere perennius" ["a monument more lasting than bronze"],10 ignoring the typical exemption of verse memorials from the "sad mortality" that, in Shakespeare's Sixty-fifth sonnet, "o'er-sways"11 their constituent materials. One can speculate that, knowing Shelley to be a prophet without honour in his own land, he conceived his lines for inscription upon a monument that the prevailing intellectual climate of England would have refused to countenance. The first part of the (notional) octave (it's actually a nonate) comprises a run of noun phrases set in apposition to each other, and so turns the poem into a

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litany of celebration. And indeed Beddoes has made use of other Christian imagery, taking his cue, no doubt, from Shelley's own assimilation of poet-speaker and Jesus in "Adonais": "He answered not, but with a sudden hand / Made bare his branded and ensanguined brow, / Which was like Cain's or Christ's" (p. 493). His subject functions as a deity incarnate, the phrase "A Spirit of the sun" connecting with the "Sanctus Spiritus" on the one hand, while on the other evoking the second person of the Trinity through that standard pun on "son" and "sun" that we find, inter alia, in Herbert's "Whitsunday": The sunne, which once did shine alone, Hung down his head, and wisht for night, When he beheld twelve sunnes for one Going about the world, and giving light. (p. 59)

Beddoes recapitulates the idea later on when we learn that "Angelic sounds . . . sunned the dim world," paraphrasing the claim in John 1.5 that"the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not." The Christian habit of paradox also helps him to realize such contradictory passages as "An Intellect ablaze with heavenly thoughts" and "A Soul with the dews of pathos shining," which sets the physics of evaporation in abeyance even as we shift from the diamantine brilliance of "blaze" to the nacreous glow of "shine." Shelley, in coming to administer to "silent woe," discharges a messianic function not dissimilar to that claimed by Jesus in Luke 4.48:"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised." But Beddoes presents Shelley as much as a poetic as moral saviour. His ministrations to "silent woe" resemble the aesthetic consolations of Keats's urn—"Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe / Than ours, a friend to man" (p. 210)—and sorrow seems to be distracted from its burdened self when it tries to unpack the dense layers of meaning leaved upon his verse—"the dark glories of concentrate song." (Here "dark" recalls Spenser's celebrated epithet in the "Prefatory Letter to Sir Walter Raleigh On The Faerie Queene": "a continued allegory, or darke conceit."12) Shelley, as a crypto-christological hub of the universe—the doctrine of kenosis claims that Jesus "made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men" (Phil 2.7)—becomes its moral epicentre. All things concentre on his utterance, and, by loading it with untold densities of meaning, concentrate it. Beddoes recalls the eagerness of the "Ode to the West Wind" ("A wave

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to pant beneath thy power") so as to convey the pulsing urgency of the poet’s message, the message of a reincarnate "son" that helped illuminate the world: "Angelic sounds / Alive with panting thoughts sunned the dim world." The "sestet" (recte septet) of this sonnet- approximation presents Shelley not only as the redeemer of the human race but also the saviour of poetry itself. Light imagery that up till now has been moderated by such epithets as "dark" and "dim" now itself "concentrates" into an irresistible sunburst: A flooding summer burst on Poetry; Of which the crowning sun, the night of beauty, The dancing showers, the birds whose anthems wild Note after note unbind the enchanted leaves Of breaking buds, eve, and the flow of dawn, Were centred and condensed in his one name As in a providence—and that was SHELLEY.

But even as Beddoes renders this "aestas adsidua" (a version of the Arcadian "ver adsiduum atque alienis mensibus aestas" ["eternal spring and summer in months not her own"]13 that Virgil propounds in the Georgics), he avoids a sense of glaringness by gradations of light and shade, moisture and radiance. Shelley is glorified by his alignment with Shakespeare and Milton: "anthems wild" recall the "Wood-notes wild" of "L’Allegro" (p. 71), which was Milton’s tribute in turn to Shakespeare’s "untutored" genius. The conceit that connects birdsong with opening buds seems to nod at the late poet’s drama, for the unbinding of the flowers, like the unbinding of the Titan, liberates scent and beauty upon the world. It also stresses the vatic force of poetry, since a semantic swivel on "leaves" (here signifying petals, though the foliate ones necessarily come to mind) recalls the practice of the Cumaean Sybil. Enchantment often involves stasis and containment, but Shelley’s registers as a comprehensive, lifegiving flow, its fluidity compressed into a capsular talisman like that proclaimed in Phil. 2.10: "at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth" (Phil. 2.10). In line with this, the soterial image of Shelley Redemptor defines him as a divine intervention, a "providence" sent to remedy human affairs. This in turn provides a scholium for the "dark glories of concentrate song" in the first part of the poem: the isolating uniqueness of "one" in "Were centred and condensed in his one name" has a deific force reminiscent of the bible: "For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus" (Tim.2.5).

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The "Drinking Song" reads like something out of a play, not least because it includes unusual data, and these flesh out the speaker’s identity more fully than is customary in a song lyric. An ordinary chanson à boire is generally festive, even when the singer has a malevolent ulterior motive (as he does when Iago sings "let me the cannikin clink, clink"—Othello 2.3.69). It receives a sinister twist in Hugo’s Lucrèce Borgia, which postdates the poem in hand, but which, even so, shows points of contact. In that play a rollicking, Beddoes-esque chanson à boire ("Saint Pierre, ouvre ta porte, / Au buveur qui t’apporte / Une voix pleine et forte / Pour chanter : Domino!"14) is sung without any consciousness of the poisoned cup in hand. But Beddoes had in fact taken this irony one step further and written a consciously suicidal brindisi: Drink! for cold’s the weather. The scull that roofed a human soul, Is it not my drinking bowl? Let us quaff together That wine the hebrew witch did brew Of nightshade fruit and sap of yew Melted in the forehead dew Of the dead man on the heather. Drink then, and be merry! The scull that held the life of man, Is it not our liquor can? Well bled, o thou berry! (p. 68)

If the speaker feel the cold, as he clearly does in line 1, he must be human, albeit a human being deranged and dispossessed. Diogenes the Cynic "believed that man should live according to nature rather than the convention invented by man and therefore reduced his equipment for life to a cloak and a drinking bowl; but on seeing a boy cupping water with his hands, he threw away the bowl."15 Even so, although inspired by the same sort of contemptus mundi, Beddoes’s speaker hasn't quite reached that pitch of austerity. The vessel he improvises occupies a point on the continuum of artifice between a crafted bowl and none at all, and the skull’s unroofing (it has been inverted to hold its liquor) glances at the unroofed condition of the subject, and so strikes an allusive chord with King Lear 3.4.28-31: Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your looped and windowed raggedness,

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But the poet has subordinated the social implications of the skullturned-vessel to his primary purpose, viz, that of confronting us with the Gothic macabre. He has taken a line from the "Ode on Melancholy"— "neither twist / Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine"16 (Keats, p. 219) and, stirring in some details from the witches’ chant in Macbeth 4.1.1ff., produced a death-dealing cocktail, the ingredients of which the singer gleefully enumerates, even as he plans to down them. This ghoulish punch differs from the hags’, however, for whereas their ingredients work toward an extrinsic excitation of evil, his is for his own consumption. Even so, the influence of Macbeth remains paramount, registering in the "sap of yew" (phonetically as well as thematically kinned with the witches’ "slips of yew"—4.1.27) and even in the casual anti-Semitism of the "hebrew witch" (suggested by "Liver of blaspheming Jew"—4.1.26), both medieval pastiche elements that demonize belief systems extra salutatem ecclesiae. Given Beddoes’s subsequent (or concurrent) friendship with Bernard Reich, I attribute the lower case H in "hebrew witch" to rapid composition rather than to the sort of orthographic slight that T. S. Eliot incorporated into "Gerontion" ("And the jew squats on the window sill"17). The corpse that yields the "forehead dew" (Beddoes doesn’t specify whether it’s the metaphorical exudation of a fever or the actual condensate itself), is found lying "on the heather," and this brings the "blasted heath" of Macbeth 1.3.77 to mind. It locates the speaker on an inhospitable moor, improvising his vessel for want of any toher. But for all its ghoulishness, the poem shows more restraint than, for example, the start of the "Leopold." Parts even seem lyrical, the "forehead dew" generating a sense of fresh immediacy rather than putrefaction. What is being sought here is a clean and rapid death, and even the association of blood and berry in the final invocation keeps the brew within the compass of the potable. Beddoes skirts the offal in the witches’ cauldron and evokes instead a ballad-style festivity: "The king sits in Dunfermline toun, / Drinking the blude-red wine".18 But what can lie behind the plural of the jussive subjunctive ("Let us quaff together")? More than one person will die, and the circumstances don't seem compatible with a Tristan und Isolde pact. Donner includes the extracted five songs from Beddoes's first play as Outidana material, though one might question his rationale for doing so: "The songs from The Brides' Tragedy naturally claim a place in this section, in which I have attempted to bring together all the poems written between 1822 and 1825."19 Would Beddoes have anthologized dramatic lyrics so early in his career, and immediately after their successful publication in the play proper? It’s also not clear why they figure in a different order, a vagary that marks Donner's management of this entire

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section: "The arrangement within the group is not strictly chronological" (p. xxvii). I myself shall make no sustained effort to relate these poems to their dramatic contexts, and read them as one reads the often-anthologized dirge from Cymbeline, typographically altered into "absolute" utterance and divested of the qualifying stage events (the female/male subject; the potion simulating death). The first song belongs to that subspecies of the mock-heroic that miniaturizes violent adult activity as child’s play. We can trace it back to the Renaissance painters, purveyors of "idylls in which the victorious Venus, having subdued the fearful Mars by love, is seen playing with his armour, or allowing her cupids and infant satyrs to play with it," and which therefore celebrated the "peaceable hope... that Love is more powerful than Strife; that the god of war is inferior to the goddess of grace and amiability."20 That tradition certainly feeds into the first of the songs: A ho! A ho! Love’s horn doth blow, And he will out a-hawking go. His shafts are light as beauty’s sighs, And bright as midnight’s brightest eyes, And round his starry way The swan-winged horses of the skies, With summer’s music in their manes, Curve their fair necks to zephyr’s reins, And urge their graceful play. (p. 68)

Here the violence of falconry has been denatured into a decorative pageant (what possible harm could be inflicted by shafts as immaterial as sighs?), its very innocence pointing to the absence of a real eroticism even though the god of love be present. The poem bears comparison with Claude Augustin Cayot's sculpture21 (1707) of Cupid and Psyche in an impassioned embrace, except that both are there awrinkle with puppy-fat, and obviously incapable of lust. Something of the same double-take occurs in the poem, the hint of bawdry in the reference to the horn expunged almost as soon as it’s activated. Headily braiding dimeter, trimeter and tetrameter together, Beddoes creates the echo-and-response structure of a conventional hunting song, though that particular form is only distantly present. He has much greater interest in such fantastical inventions as shafts made of sighs and reins fashioned from wind. An echo of Byron— "She walks in beauty, like the night / Of cloudless climes and starry skies"22—can be heard in the experiential compounds of brilliance and darkness, "midnight’s brightest eyes" admitting complementary readings either as brilliant dark eyes or the most prominent stars in a black sky.

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Wanting to avoid the grandeur of Pegasus, Beddoes scales down Cupid’s steeds to swans, placing emphasis on the rococo grotesquerie of the juncture, and taking us into the world of the Pompeian arabesque: Humano capiti cervicem picor equinam iungere si velit, et varias induciere plumas undique collatis membris, ut turpiter atrum desinat in piscem ulier Formosa superne, spectatum admissi dirum tentatis, amici? [If a painter chose to join a human head to the neck of a horse and spread feathers of many a hue over limbs picked up now here now there, so that what at the top is a lovely woman ends below in a black and ugly fish, could you, my friends, if favoured with a private view, refrain from laughing?]23

Like Horace, Beddoes shows us rococo fantasy in the making, miniaturizing and so re-energizing the otherwise standard mental image of a life-sized horse. The curvature of their necks is also swanlike, not least because "curve" functions as an intransitive verb, the reins having no material reality and therefore no shaping power. The second stanza continues this vein of fanciful miniaturization, and instead of the raptors more usually associated with falconry, Beddoes lists birds that would more usually be hawked for. And rather than have a single falcon settle on the hawker's gauntlet, he releases a cloud of passerines upon the godling: A ho! A ho! Love's horn doth blow, And he will out a-hawking go. The sparrows that flutter round his wrist, The feathery thieves that Venus kissed And taught their morning song,

Since this scaled-down falconer takes troublesome insects as his quarry, Beddoes supplements the cohort of seed-eating sparrows and linnets with swallows, remembering no doubt, the biology lessons his father had given him in his childhood. But, that little pedantry aside, his chief concern is with the erotic symbolism of the birds (familiar from Measure for Measure—"Sparrows must not build in his house-eaves, because they are lecherous"—3.2.169-70), and from the elegy for Lesbia's pet bird, which Catullus envies for its access to her person: "nec sese a gremio illius movebat" [Nor would he stir from her lap].24 For the beautiful lilt and tumble of the swallows’ flight—

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—the poet has also gone to school on Gray’s "Ode on the Spring": "The insect youth are on the wing, / Eager to taste the honeyed spring."25 The third stanza offers a mock-heroic climax in the form of war on wasps and flies, the latter figuring as a generic term—an archaism borrowed from such sources as Donne’s Canonization" ("Call her one, me another fly"26) rather than the insects that biologists classify as Muscidae. The immediate inspiration comes from Titania’s commands in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 2.2.2-7— Some to kill cankers in the musk-rose buds; Some war with rere-mice for their leathern wings, To make my small elves coats; and some keep back The clamorous owl, that nightly hoots and wonders At our quaint spirits

—and also from Campion, for when Beddoes has gnats skipping "To filch the fruit of ladies’ lips," we are at once put in mind of "Cherry-Ripe": There's the land, or cherry-isle: Whose plantations fully show All the year, when cherries grow.27

A conceit turns insects into "airy ships," their abdomens like hulls and their wings like sails, while the piercing anchorage of the sting drives the image home with arresting mordancy: And woe to flies, whose airy ships On beauty cast their anchoring bite, And bandit wasp, that naughty wight, Whose sting is slaughter red.

Beddoes’s powers of observation, either exceptionally acute or aided by attentive dissection, have allowed him to pick up the purplish colour a wasp’s aculeus, which he stylizes as sanguinary scarlet in order to enhance the drama. We are no doubt meant to envisage a droplet of the mistress’s blood depending from that stinger, a stinger set up in adversarial tension with Cupid’s shafts. The archaic use of "wight" helps sustain the pastiche charm of the poem, as does the ambiguous "naughty" in both its contemporary and (more dignified) Elizabethan acceptations, the latter

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familiar from The Merchant of Venice 3.2.18-19: "O these naughty times / Put bars between the owners and their rights! " The succeeding lyric, also a pastiche, flags its simulated antiquity by such devices as the Old English preposition prefix in "A-listening" and the pseudo-perfective prefix of "ybrined", along with the seemingly obsolete preterite form of "sate" (though the Oxford English Dictionary records a post-dating from Vanity Fair). But the simulated antiquation of "Poor old pilgrim Misery" encompasses more than Wardour Street nostalgia: it is also old in kind, an emblematic composition not dissimilar to that of Dürer's Melancholia, one of "three famous copper engravings . . . made in 1513 and 1514,"28 or such verbal tableaux as the Cave of Mammon in The Faerie Queene: In all that rowme was nothing to be seene, But huge great yron chests and coffers strong, All bard with double bends, that none could weene Them to efforce by violence or wrong; On euery side they placed were along. But all the ground with sculs was scattered, And dead mens bones, . . .29

T. D. Barlow, trying to account for the multiple foci and incidental detail of Dürer's earlier compositions, remarks that in "medieval art we look rather for richness of content than for formal unity,"30which also characterizes the inventorial busyness of the poem in hand: Poor old pilgrim Misery, Beneath the silent moon he sate A-listening to the screech owl’s cry And the cold wind’s goblin prate; Beside him lay his crutch of yew With withered willow twined, His scant grey hairs all wet with dew, His cheeks with tears ybrined; And his cry was ever, alack! Alack and woe is me. (p. 69)

Pilgrims are ordinarily identified by sanctifying journeys, but this one seems stranded, sedentary and goalless, unlike his purposeful confreres in Collins’s "Ode Composed in the Year 1746" ("There Honour comes, a pilgrim grey"31) and "Ode to Evening" ("Against the pilgrim borne in heedless hum"—p. 464). The rapt summer’s night and complaining owl of Gray’s "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" have also been recast in

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a wintry and discordant guise ("Beneath the silent moon he sate / Alistening to the screech owl’s cry / And the cold wind’s goblin prate"). Beddoes makes the funereal yew of his crutch an emblem of mortality as well as decrepitude, just as the withered condition of the willow layers an additional signifier on to the traditional emblem of griefthat we find in Psalm 137.1-2:"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof." Having thus been set up in a matrix of emblems, Misery utters a selfdefining cry of woe, the anadiplosis of "alack" arching across the linebreak to suggest the unbroken circularity of his grief ("alack! / Alack, and woe is me"). A whimsical aetiology creates a chain of droplets that is stolen by a "wanton elf" and installed in the breast of an unhappy woman. Although The Brides’ Tragedy describes the lyric as "a silly song old nurses use / To hush their crying babes with" (Works, p. 177), its nursery idiom masks (and intensifies by masking) its amorous dimension. The elf might belong to the world of the Märchen, but its behaviour turns it to all intents and purposes into a mischievous Cupid. The speaker then urges the grieving addressee to narrate her sorrow ("tell" in that sense), but also to pay back ("tell" signifying "count") the beads of her breast-enclosed rosary-lachrymatory. She is being asked to cry, and, by crying, to show her emotional susceptibility and a capacity for love. Collins had adumbrated a similar argument in his "Sonnet": When Phoebe formed a wanton smile, My soul, it reached not here! Strange that thy peace, thou trembler, flies Before a rising tear! From midst the drops my love is born, That o'er those eyelids rove: Thus issued from a teeming wave, The fabled queen of love. (p. 365)

Beddoes’s speaker implicitly demands the same kind of tearful submission: With his plunder ran that felon elf And hid it in your eyes, Then tell me back the stolen pelf, Give up the lawless prize;

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The ironic implications of "lawless" in relation to the poem's libertine argument scarcely need spelling out. The next poem, Floribel's simple quatrain of abandonment, bears comparison with Olivia's song in The Vicar of Wakefield on the one hand— The only art her guilt to cover, To hide her shame from every eye, To give repentance to her lover, And wring his bosom—is to die.32

—and, on the other (though more remotely) with Ophelia's commemoration of faithlessness in Hamlet, which tells a story instead of obliquely charting its consequences: ("And dupp'd the chamber door, / Let in the maid that out a maid / Never departed more"—4.5.53-55): The knight he left the maid, That knight of fickleness, Her's was the blame he said, And his the deep distress. (p. 69)

Floribel shows greater spirit than either of her predecessors when she anatomizes the perennial double standard applied to male and female behaviour. By inverting the conventions of chivalry—its traditional motifs of quest and damsel in distress—she depicts the knight in ignominious retreat instead of boldly riding forth as he does in the chanson d’aventure("Als I me rode this endre day"33), and, instead of the usual encounter with an abandoned lover whose planctus he overhears, the planctus becomes Floribel’s own. Beddoes keeps intact the traditional formula of coupling "knight" with an attributive genitive (such as the "KNIGHT OF THE RED CROSSE, OR OF HOLINESSE" in Book I of The Faerie Queene—p. 3), but replaces virtue with an unknightly quality, driving this home through a deictic of contemptuous dissociation—"That knight of fickleness." His self-exculpation remains a form of words, as the verba dicendi show ("Her's was the blame he said"), and she registers his guilt with an implied ontological "was" ("And his the deep distress") that falls outside the sophistries attached to "he said." Lenora’s dirge-lullaby, sung in the play over the corpse of Floribel, involves the same juxtaposition of maternity and premature death that characterizes the Pietà throughout the ages, and which Tchaikovsky would later recycle in Mazeppa when Maria cradles her dead lover’s head and, in the same "distracted manner" (p. 69) that Beddoes requires of Lenora, tries

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to sing him to sleep ("Spi, moy rodnóy!/ Spi, spi, dityá"—Sleep, sleep, my darling. / sleep, sleep, my child!"34): Lullaby, lullaby, sweet be thy sleep! Thou babe of my bosom, thou babe of my love; Close, close to my heart, dear caresser, you creep, And kiss the fond eyelid that watches above.

Just as King Lear's parental yearning imparts life to the lifeless ("Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips, / Look there, look there!"—5.3.0910), so Lenora imagines that her daughter nestlingly returns her embrace. This is one of Beddoes’s most artless and at the same time most moving productions, marked by a lilting epizeuxis that reproduces the static rock of a cradle-song ("Lullaby, lullaby") as well as the earnest strivings of a mother unable to process her grief ("Close, close to my heart"). Reading the poem "By Two Voices" (p. 70) on the page, one immediately thinks of that dialogue in "The Ancient Mariner" glossed as "The Polar Spirit’s fellow-daemons, the invisible inhabitants of the element, [who] take part in his wrong, and . . . relate, one to the other, that penance long and heavy."35 It can indeed make perfect sense if we contextualize it in terms of this mysterious, disembodied form, but in the play proper, the voices belong to Olivia’s retinue, and the song serves as a decorative interlude similar to those in The Merchant of Venice and King Henry VIII. The antiphonic structure proceeds by a deployment of question and answer familiar from The Matthew Passion, which differentiates the two musical lines through their separate solo roles and through their convergent unisons or divergent harmonies: Coro I See Him, Coro II Whom? Coro I The Bridegroom Christ, See Him, Coro II How, Coro I A spotless Lamb,36

The song from The Merchant of Venice probably provided Beddoes with his deep structure, since it, too, centres on a fancied aetiology of human experience, and is also cast as solos and unisons:

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Tell me where is Fancy bred, Or in the heart, or in the head? How begot, how nourished? ALL. Reply, reply. It is engender'd in the eyes, With gazing fed; and Fancy dies In the cradle where it lies. Let us all ring Fancy's knell I'll begin it. Ding, dong, bell. ALL. Ding, dong, bell. (3.2.63-62)

Beddoes has substituted a lullaby for a knell, but retained the image of a cradled infant: First Voice Who is this baby, that doth lie Beneath the silken canopy Of thy blue eye? Second It is young Sorrow, laid asleep In the crystal deep. Both Let us sing his lullaby, Heigho! a sob and a sigh. (p. 70)

Donne’s "Good Morrow" refers to the eye-contained eidola of lovers— "My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears" (p. 60)—an image that Beddoes also uses here, allowing the reflection of the beloved (the implicit cause of woe) to exist independently of its source, and putting it to bed in an eyelid that functions as a valanced crib. The blueness of the containing eye modulates in turn to a body of water as in Crashaw’s "Weeper" ("Two walking baths; two weeping motions; / Portable, and compendious oceans"37). However, the conceit is rather less jarringly insisted on, for "deep" can function both as an indication of intensity (measuring the blue of the iris) and as an enallagic noun for the sea. To be "laid asleep / In the crystal deep" is effectively to have drowned in excessive grief, the refrain "Heigho!" recalling the stylized sigh we find in Much Ado About Nothing (2.1.300-01): "I may sit in a corner and cry 'Heigh-ho for a husband'!" Infants cry lustily when they awake, but if they are suspended in liquid as in Beddoes’s conceit, that crying will become a bubbled negation of sound—an effect duplicated in the sonnet "To Silence": Huge, viewless, ocean into which we cast Our passing words, and, as they sink away,

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The second strophe’s "bubbled tear" functions as a metonym for that cry and also as a defined entity of liquid within a containing liquid body, theoretically demarcated as a bubble, and effect both pretty and ontologically teasing at the same time: What sound is that, so soft, so clear, Harmonious as a bubbled tear Bursting, we hear?

Beddoes’s management of the line lengths shows great assurance, the recession into the dimeter of the third and tenth lines dramatizing cosy enclosure ("Of thy blue eye") in the first instance, and a dramatic termination ("Suddenly awaking") in the second. One could describe "To Agrippina Under a Picture of Her" as an ecphrastic ode, for the poem—a sort of sonnet sans couplet—might well have originated in an encounter with Benjamin West’s Agrippina landing at Brundisium with the Ashes of Germanicus,38 which had circulated as an engraving. Its composition reveals a certain static airlessness, registering no sense of motion in the central group, and therefore turning a procession into figures "groupées dans les attitudes de la douleur,"39 in the words of Noverre. This stasis becomes all the more arresting for the vigorous torsion of the figure in green to the right, and whether or not West supplied Beddoes with a point of departure, there can be no doubting that he also strove for an effect of marmoreal rigidity: The winds of morn that dallied in thy vest, S[till] as thy marble burthen, found thee so; Thy husband’s ashes mouldering on thy breast; The breathless statue of unmurmuring woe. (p.70)

In Shirley, Charlotte Brontë describes "a girl of living marble, stillness personified,"40 and so points to patriarchal preoccupations with decorativeness and passivity; Beddoes for his part takes these qualities to a level much more profound. Agrippina’s grief has more in common with the immobile grief of Hyperion ("gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone, / Still as the silence round about his lair"—p. 221). But whereas Keats intensifies the Titan’s unmovingness when he extends it into his environment— No stir of air was there, Not so much life as on a summer's day

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Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass, But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest. (p. 221)

—Beddoes has a breeze riffle the peplon of the grieving widow, heightening (but in no way affecting) the still posture of her sorrow. The hyperbatic organization of the sentence foregrounds the phrase "Still as thy marble burthen," and the simile seems puzzlingly to apply to the "winds of morn" until we realize that she has become indistinguishable from the marble urn she carries against her breast. We even form a brief impression of her having failed to move at all despite the passage of centuries, the immediate deictic force of "so" seeming (along with the decay of "mouldering") to gesture at her immobility even at the time of composition. Donner, while confident of his emendation in the second line, doesn’t venture a guess for the lacuna in the sixth: On thy wan tear-salt cheek slept sad despair; No outward wound thy —— bosom wore, Though the warm heart no more was beating there: It was thy soul the fangs of anguish tore,

I would propose "perfect" to fill the gap. It confirms the external woundlessness of the breast and the soigné condition of Agrippina’s clothes (contrasted with the other kinds of mourning—"rend your heart, and not your garments"—Joel 2.13)—emblem of the "perfect" ("entire" as well as "faultless") stoic containment of the widow’s grief. However, the unscarred marble perfection of the outer bosom belies the turmoil within, the violence and agitation of scarifying teeth ("It was thy soul the fangs of anguish tore") recalling the Spartan youth who "concealed under his cloak a young fox which he had stolen," and "suffered the animal to tear out his bowels with its teeth and claws, and died rather than have his theft detected."41 Beddoes enhances the statuesque stillness of Agrippina by inverting the standard sequence of "salt" and "tear" that we find say, in Donne ("But now I have drunk thy sweet salt tears"—p. 91; "Oft fed with true oaths, and with sweet salt tears"—p. 42), and, in "tear-salt", suggests a residue left after evaporation—a mineral deposit on the stone. Ambiguity in the phrasing ("the warm heart no more was beating there") suggests that the woman's grief has turned her into "living marble," but it also has a causative force. A heart might once have beaten against it (the heart of Germanicus, in other words), as well as within.

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In the final stanza, Beddoes seems to shift from rigidity to deliquescence, but in effect the slowness of "oozed" serves only to confirm the subject's immobility: Thine angel-soul, which like the heaven-wept snow Outlived the storms of grief-dispensing years, But when the sun of hope just lent a glow, Oozed softly, slowly out in bitter tears.

The liquidity of "wept," "misapplied" to solid snow, hints at the tears suppressed throughout the matron’s life—tears that even now are so slow and reined-in that they evaporate into salty tracks across her face. Because the "Sonnet to Zoë King" originated as an album verse, Beddoes plays with that traditionally trivial enterprise by turning what would ordinarily be a page of froth by recalling the book of record from the "Dies irae": Liber scriptus proferetur, In quo totum continetur, Unde mundus judicetur.42 [The inscribed book will be brought forth In which everything is contained, And from which the world will be judged.]

The poet avoids the graceful erotic compliment associated with album verse, for, as Donner points out, the poem is "wholly impersonal and philosophical." No wonder poor Zoë confessed to being "too much 'in awe of his reserve and of his talents' to presume on his company and conversation."43 The central idea—having "the world" look over the shoulder of a writer in the act of composition—is not on the face of it original, as witness this passage from a recent novel: "Was ever such a letter written by a man to a man? How the world would howl and condemn if it read over my shoulder, yet everything in it is as natural and true as the spring itself."44 However Beddoes literalizes the world (no longer abstract but concrete and topographical) to fashion a conceit: Leaf after leaf like a magician’s book Unfolds the Universe, and needs we now, Cousin of mine (while the whole world doth look Our shoulders over with its rocky brow), (p. 71)

The earth's "rocky brow" evokes a gargantuan, half-realized figure not unlike one imagined by Charlotte Brontë in Shirley—

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I saw—I now see—a Woman-Titan; her robe of blue air spreads to the outskirts of the heath, where yonder flock is grazing; a veil white as an avalanche sweep from her head to her feet, and arabesques of lightning flame on its borders. (p. 260)

—for, like Brontë, Beddoes devises a Arcimboldian composite of topographical details. "Rocky brow" evokes the furrows and seams of a human frown but renders them as the scars of geological strata. And, since this massive, intimidating spectator looms over the shoulders of the writer and his addressee, it's appropriate that the leaves should themselves become huge tectonic plates, "earthen" suggesting "global" (that is, "relating to the earth") as well as "fashioned from clay," like the tablets of the Decalogue: In turn our living story must transact Upon the surface of its earthen pages; When the still shade of our most needless act Shall paint itself with iron syllables In the arched sight of unawakened ages.

Here we must construe "universe" in the narrower sense that the Oxford English Dictionary lists under 4a, viz, "The world, the earth, esp. considered as the abode of mankind or with reference to human activity." Indeed, the idea of "human activity" looms large in the poem, since Beddoes has for once suspended his obsession with cosmology. By referring to "leaves" rather than pages, he evokes the enigmatic procedures of the Cumaean Sybil, who inscribed her prophecies on the foliage of an oak. The idea of sibyls leads smoothly to that of mages, and so to the "magician’s book," the content of which remains mysterious. As these leaves unfold, formulae for unread or unspoken spells spool out in front of Thomas and Zoë without their being able fully to grasp them—the very converse of Habbakuk’s celebrated vision: "And the Lord answered me, and said, Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it" (2:2). In the face of this (possibly malign) bafflement, he urges that they take control of their lives, their "living story" to be read both as their story immortalized and also as their lifestory, the story of their living. The sonnet therefore functions as a protreptikon or poem of exhortation along the lines of Marvell’s "To His Coy Mistress" and Tennyson’s "Ulysses," post- and pre-echoes of which sound throughout. Consider, for example, the "arched sight of unawakened ages", which looks ahead to Tennyson’s "all experience is an arch wherethrough / Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades / For

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ever and for ever when I move"45; and consider also the "iron" of the syllables contained in that arch, recalling the resolute energy with which Marvell’s speaker and mistress take control of their destinies: And now, like am'rous birds of prey, Rather at once our Time devour, Than languish in his slow-chapp'd pow'r. Let us roll all our Strength and all Our sweetness, up into one Ball: And tear our Pleasure with rough strife, Thorough the Iron gates of Life.46

Beddoes generates a similar sense of urgency, for his poem, like Marvell’s urging, remains acutely conscious of the compulsions of time, as witness its ineluctable future tense-form ("shall"). Compare "Thy Beauty shall no more be found / Nor in the marble Vault, shall sound / My ecchoing Song" (p. 28) with "the still shade of our most needless act / Shall paint itself with iron syllables" (my emphasis). The catachreses created by physical "paint" in the context of an immaterial "shade," by the "visuality" of "paint" in relation to the "vocality" of "syllables", and by the immateriality of "shade" vis-à-vis the tangibility of "iron"—all these clashes relate to Beddoes’s protoSymboliste imagination, and ought not to be rejected as ineptly mixed metaphors. He savours the imaginative dissonances that keep wrongfooting a mind that tries to reconcile them, and even as the utterance strains to fly apart in a clash of competing registers, ficelles of connection bind it up. The "arched sight of unawakened ages" duplicates the "rocky brow" of the world, where "sight" cooperates with "arched" to activate the idea of eyebrows, while the silent evasiveness of "still shade" is made clamorous with the resonance of "iron," itself a kind of reveille for the sleep of "unawakened ages." A mysterious third party enters into the proptreptic "sestet" (properly a quintet, given the delay of the volta to the ninth line). Beddoes falls back on the Christian notion of immanence— "That good thing which was committed unto thee keep by the Holy Ghost which dwelleth in us" (2 Tim. 1.14)—but modifies it into something altogether more secular, for the "general mind" paraphrases the Stoic idea of the "anima mundi": "I assure you, Lucilius, the sacred breath (which animates the Universe) resides within us, watching and guarding the good and the evil in us; as we treat it, so it treats us."47 This animating spirit must be the third presence of the sonnet, the preposition "beneath" stressing its immanent rather than transcendent location, while the epithet "starry" provides an astrological metonym for

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the external influence of fate. Beddoes interplaits the syntax to emblematize the connectedness of all three figures. Their goal, articulated in the complementary infinitive ("to find"), has to be worked toward through a thicket of qualifying phrases. A sort of traductio picks up the infinitive of "to find" in a present participle ("finding"), allowing us topause for breath before we push toward the realization of that discovery: "truth and good to find, / And finding practise to his end of power." (Modern habits of punctuation would have dictated parenthetic commas on either side of "finding" to show that we have reached a restful "plateau" in the unfolding of the syntax.) The untitled "Song" that follows the sonnet is also a protreptikon of sorts, but an erotic rather than a high-mindedly Stoical one: By the honey golden gem On the queen bee's diadem, The flower from which she flew Was rosy sweet a one As ever drank the summer sun; But I could make you sweeter far, Blossom's maid, than ever are Born within a shower, Christened with the dew, Dying in an hour. (p. 71)

The subtext of this "carpe florem" urging comes from A Midsummer Night's Dream—"But earthlier happy is the rose distill'd / Than that which, withering on the virgin thorn, / Grows, lives, and dies, in single blessedness" (1.1.76-78)—for Beddoes’s rose is also "blessedly single." However, the song proposes that the beloved, analogue of the rose, immortalize her sweetness through procreation—a recurrent concern also in the earlier Shakespeare sonnets. At the same time, however, Beddoes’s ambiguous phrasing allows us to construe the lyric as a variant of the "aere perennius" topos. Being eternized in verse, the mistress will eclipse the transient rose that has no verbal memorial. The zoology is charmingly and intentionally archaic, for we can be sure that the son of Dr Beddoes would have known that queen bees don’t harvest nectar, and that there are no organs on their heads that remotely approximate a diadem. Notwithstanding that, the poet gives her a coronet of topazes, fancied globules of honey, even though honey of course in an end-product, and even though bees pack pollen into their scopae and not on to their foreheads. Beddoes strives for an effect of Tudor fancy, fashioned from bestiary lore rather than observed data. We see this in his lightening of the solemn orcos or oath by displacing the usual gods with a

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bee, albeit a queen bee whose rank matches the supremacy of the rose in the scheme of flowers—"as rosy sweet a one / As ever drank the summer sun." With the idea of a "golden gem" still in mind, Beddoes half-invites the reader to imagine sunlight as a honey-coloured fluid that the flower drinks into itself and deposits as golden droplets on the foragers. The transient nature of real roses, and the transient nature of a virginal life that ends without issue come together in the concluding "carpe florem," rendered as a sort of infant baptism ("Christened with the dew, / Dying in an hour"). The "Song from 'Torrismond'" bears comparison with one of Elizabeth Barrett’s Sonnets from the Portuguese—an ironical resonance, since her husband would subsequently lose a crucial box of manuscripts, and earn the undying resentment of Beddoes aficionados for his carelessness. Notwithstanding Blake’s caution that you should "Never pain to tell thy love, / Love that never told can be,"48 Browning's wife does just that, slipping by a sleight of hand from the enumerable to the uncountable and ineffable: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.49

Beddoes attempts something similar, though he handles the adunata in a different way: How many times do I love thee, dear? Tell me how many thoughts there be In the atmosphere Of a new-fall’n year, Whose white and sable hours appear The latest flake of Eternity:— So many times do I love thee, dear. (p. 71)

This is masterfully vague and suggestive. Thoughts are immaterial, and yet here they elide with the falling snow on 1 January, a date associated with thoughtful self-review ever since Roman times. The year falls as though it were the snow itself, and its first day—a unit of twenty-four hours (some of them radiant with snow, the others darkened by nightfall)—becomes a notional flake, miniscule and transient sub specie aeternitatis. Beddoes compounds the adunaton of thoughts made visible with the adunaton of counting them, the snowflakes having somehow become mental phenomena (associated, no doubt, with the new year's stock-taking and its

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"sessions of sweet silent thought"). Like Barrett Browning, his speaker establishes the limitlessness, which is to say the Blakean "untellability" of his love. Inclusio matches the versicle of the first line with a response in the last, pretending patly to arrive at a sum that remains unrecordable even so. The second strophe advances another image of "untellability," viz, raindrops crossing the face of the moon, for "star" clearly demands that we adopt what the OED calls the "extended sense" of this word, viz, "any one of the heavenly bodies, including the sun and moon," while "main" also insists that we apply to it the less familiar meaning of "broad expanse." Even though Beddoes pretends to restrict the task to counting only those drops that pass across the moon’s disc, it hardly facilitates the adunaton: the seemingly reduced tally still defies measurement. He slips in additional difficulties further to confound us, for in the last resort, the only permissible reading of "thread" is that of "stretching threads across," but its collocation with "eye" inevitably evokes "threading a needle." Since moon and needle have nothing in common, we try to process the image of a rain-thread passing through the infinitesimal eye of a fixed star before abandoning it for a construction that has the moon crisscrossed by falling rain. By the same token, because the ocean has often figured as an image of immeasurability, we make a futile attempt to read "main" in its marine sense, a productive failure, since it carries an enriching hint that celebrated Shelleyan entrelacement, "the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean".50 The "Threnody" that follows is one of several elegiac fragments. According to Donner, who anchors them on to the sonnet written on 29 February 1824, they "were all written during that and the following year" (Works, p. xxviii), though I’m unconvinced by his attempt to slot all of them into a biographical context: "Whether these laments were actually written after his mother's death on 5 May 1824, or whether inspired by the knowledge of her extreme illness, there is no means of knowing" (p. xxviii). Most of them, however, talk of a "maid," "maiden" or "daughter," and, what is more, offer no hint of a specifically filial grief. Indeed, their graceful reliance on conceits suggest that Beddoes composed them as an exercise in fancy rather than as the vector of personal sorrow. The exception in this respect is the "Threnody," which, though both delicate and fanciful, strikes a note of heartfelt intensity that might indeed relate to a mother’s death, especially since it offers the reader no disqualifying information about the subject’s age. Beddoes begins with a cosmic black-out that looks ahead to Auden— "The stars are not wanted now; put out every one, / Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun."51 At the same time, it also looks back toward Donne,

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for his "Nocturnal upon S. Lucy's Day" equatesperfect darkness with bereavement: "'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's."52No surprise, therefore, that the "Threnody" should begin with an exorcism of light: No sunny ray, no silver night! Cruelly alight! Glare of noontide, star of e'en Otherwhere descend! (p. 72)

The speaker issues a comprehensive ban, sunlight and moonlight and starlight alike unwelcome for their dissonant lucency. He also rejects (as being too festive) the flower catalogue by which the pastoral elegy figures nature's participatory grief ("Throw hither all your quaint enamell'd eyes, / That on the green turf suck the honied showers, / And purple all the ground with vernal flowers"53): No violet-eyed green Bare its daisies' yellow end, The dewy debt receive of any eye!

One wonders whether the poet had made the acquaintance of Goethe's Farbelehre at this point of his life. If not, the rich complementarity of yellow and purple suggests that he had, even so, intuited some of the principles enunciated in that work. "Yellow end" works as a stroke of vivid colour, but remains difficult to construe. If this be a country green, banished for its Keatsian associations with "Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth" (p. 207), then it can hardly be home to violets and daisies—unless, of course, they grow only at its further reaches ("ends"). But even then, the daisies most likely to grow here would be the pink and white Bellis perennis. On the other hand, if "yellow" apply to the daisies' dying foliage rather than to their petals, the "end" in question must be the mortal rather than the topographical one. After this suggestive and open-ended proem, Beddoes resorts to a bare poetry of statement, the harsh spondee of assertion undefiably turning the green into a grave, while the colon-strengthened caesura enforces a moment of commemorative silence: It is a grave: and she doth lie 'Neath roses' root, And the fawn's mossy foot, Under the skylark's floor, Whose graceful life held every day— As lilies, dew—as dews, the starry ray—

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More music, grace, delight than they.

Beddoes stresses the remove of the corpse from the beauties unfolding above it. It subtends the delight of the rose, the grace of the fawn and the music of the lark without being absorbed into them. By stressing that separation, this pastoral elegy withdraws a consolation typically adduced by the form—that of natural incorporation: "Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, / With rocks, and stones, and trees."54 Each of those delights occupies a separate line, and then the qualities they each embody collapse, stretched out like the recumbent corpse they cannot reach: "More music, grace, delight than they." The comparative phrases brim within themselves like a three-tiered fountain, the containment of those qualities in the subject’s life enfolding the lily’s containment of the dew, and the dew’s containment of the light. Dashes, protracting the line-end pauses and heightening the caesura, convey a sense of hushed, precarious balance. Having exorcized festive colour harmonies of purple, green and gold, and having banished clarifying light, Beddoes ends on a crepuscular note: When stars are few let light be here, Of the softest, through the boughs Berry-laden, sad and few; And the wings of one small bird, His form unseen, his voice unheard—

This minimal light in a forestscape owes something to the "Ode to a Nightingale"—"But here there is no light, / Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown" (p. 208)—while a partial parody of Genesis 1.3—"And God said, Let there be light: and there was light"—mutes that grandiose conception into a few stars glimpsed through branches. Indeed, Beddoes’s adverbial modification ("Of the softest") all but extinguishes it. An alternative draft cites yews by name, but berries and a general funereality (memories of Keats’s "Ode on Melancholy") are enough evoke them in the "official" text, where an additional mortal resonance ("boughs . . . sad and few") arises from the offstage presence of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73: "When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang / Upon those boughs which shake against the cold."55 By thinning the boughs, however, Beddoes has put the invisibility of his mourning bird at risk. The phrasing of "form unseen" recalls the mysterious presences in Collins’s "Ode, Written in the Beginning of the Year 1746" ("By fairy hands their knell is rung, / By forms unseen their dirge is sung"—p. 437), and the aposiopesis confirms the profundity of the silence the poem evokes, and the ultimate inexpressibility of its grief.

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Injunctions for silence also characterize the "Fragment of a Dirge" that follows. The inchoate noise of mourning (sighs) yields to the sound of music, which imparts order to disorderly feeling and reconciles the griefstricken to their loss. Beddoes’s first person plural evokes a group of mourners gathered round a bier (as in Cymbeline): Hushed be sighing near the string, O’er whose tremours deep we sing The youngest death who hath no fears, Blood, nor pang, nor any tears. Hushed be sighing. (p. 73).

The string, metonym for music and (indirectly) for poetry, sublimates the sorrow of the mourners, and stands in for their quivering grief with its surrogate "tremours deep." "Youngest death" has a crypto-adverbial sense of recency, and also hints at the youthfulness of the dead subject, though the catachretic substitution of an abstract noun for a personal ("youngest death" as opposed to "youngest victim") blurs the outlines of the situation, especially since the personal adjectival clause ("who hath no fears") can't properly attach itself to an abstraction. We can infer from this that the death was sudden and painless, or that the tearless subject was especially stoical, given the echo of "I had no human fears" (Wordsworth, p. 149). A dimetric repetition of "Hushed be the sighing" ushers in the second half of the dirge, graphically contracting the outline of the poem and putting it in quasi-causal apposition with the dimeter at the end—"The maiden’s dying"—which throws some light on circumstances of the grief. Blake’s poem to the sunflower—"Where the youth pined away with desire / And the pale virgin shrouded in snow" (p. 221)—suggests that death before sexual fulfilment amounts to deprivation, but Beddoes introduces the figure of Eros by a similaic sleight-of-hand, and relates his beauty to hers. Having entered the poem on the back of a comparison, the god then becomes an actual presence, a psychopomp embracing the dead girl and offering a consummation that her sublunary life has denied her: "His the dead when music closes." Beddoes here restfully denatures death into music when it "closes" like the "dying fall" in Twelfth Night 1.1.4. Additional consolation springs from the sense of an attentive and watchful providence insofar as Eros observes the falling petals so closely that he can hear their faint vegetable impact—a hint of Matt 10.29: "Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father." "Another" is, as its interconnecting title suggests, a further elegiac "fragment," which, like its predecessor, still makes sense in its partially

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finished state. Here Beddoes has availed himself of the same Platonic belief propounded in King Henry VI Part I—"A far more glorious star thy soul will make / Than Julius Caesar or bright" (1.1.55-56). This goes back to the cosmogony expounded the Timaeus, which claims that when God "had compounded the whole he divided it into souls equal in number to the stars, and each several soul he assigned to one star, and setting them each as it were in a chariot,"56 and that same chariot figures in Beddoes’s lyric as a car: To her couch of evening rest ‘Neath the sun’s divinest west, Bear we, in the silent car, This consumed incense star, This dear maid whose life is shed, And whose sweets are sweetly dead. (p. 73)

Since wheel-borne vehicles are necessarily noisy, we seem to be dealing with an aerial cortège, its destination (the terrestrial west can hardly own to "divine" gradations) some point in the western sky. The maid must be returning to the constellation from which she originated, and although "Consumed incense" registers at first as the ash of a thurible, the incompatibility of "star" with "incense" (conceived as granules of aromatic gum) prompts a contre rejet, forcing us to reread "incense" as the Englished Latin participle "incensus" ("burned up"), and to create a "hendiatic" doublet of adjectives that reinforce each other without any discord of scale. At the same time, that "wrong" glimpse of thurible incense activates the idea of fragrance in the final line, an idea compounded with that Catholic extravagance, the "odour of sanctity": "And whose sweets are sweetly dead." The fact that the star remains a star even after its apparent combustion strikes a consolatory note, and so too does the sense of life as an impeding carapace from which death frees us: "This dear maid whose life is shed." "Epitaph," as its title implies, is a poem written at a later point in the rite of burial. A major tradition in elegy centres on the calm and the beauty of the tomb, as when, in "Anakreons Grab," Goethe draws comfort from the poet's repose in a happy landscape: Welch ein Grab ist hier, das alle Götter mit Leben Schön bepflanzt und besiert? Es ist Anakreons Ruh. Frühling, Sommer und Herbst genoss der glückliche Dichter; Vor dem Winter hat ihn endlich der Hügel geschütz. [Whose is this grave, this place all the gods have adorned like a garden

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However, an alternative elegiac tradition—we could term it the "Gothic" strain—stresses underground corruption, and draws attention to the dehumanizing process of decay. Exemplars of this would be Eliot's "Whispers of Immortality"—"And breastless creatures under ground / Leaned backward with a lipless grin"58—and the graveyard scene in Hamlet:"and now—howabhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft" (5.1.18083). Beddoes strikes a median path between these extremes, presenting his grave as something neglected rather than restful (as in Goethe), but, by way of compensation, turning the body to inoffensive dust: Yet, beneath this stone Dust lies, weeds grow: and this is the remain Of one best union of that deathless twain. (p. 73)

The "deathless twain" are physical and moral perfection, qualities that Beddoes evokes through an "ubi sunt" topos—"The form’s divinity, the heart’s best grace, / Where are they?" The answer lies in the dusty, weedy grave toward which he gestures. Taken as a simple versicle and response about transience, the poem might not seem to break new ground, but there is something original about its satiric, ad hominem address: Have they their immortal throne Upon thy maiden’s thought, and peerless face, Thou cold-eyed reader?

The set-up reader clearly fails to realize his or her mortality. "Cold-eyed" might suggest dispassionate appraisal, but that dispassionateness is an illusion. Platonic absolutes can find no fixture in their frail human vectors, and have perpetually to be reincarnated—a point repeated in "Another Fragment of the Same": Immortal should be beauty and heart’s grace And so they are; yet neither e’er are known But in a mortal—and a godlike face. (p. 74)

"Godlike"—human hyperbole that reaches toward divinity in an effort to capture the best in itself—remains just that—a simile rather than a reality. There is something oddly mediaeval in this subordination of the transient

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individual to the permanent absolute that it embodies for a time, because, as Nikolaus Pevsner points out, "the Middle Ages did not demand portrait likeness" insofar as it entailed "what is merely accidental in human nature."59 The "Lines Written at Geneva; July 16 [1824]" were composed en route back from Italy, where Mrs Beddoes had died two months earlier. Donner claims that her son was "struck with horror at the thought of having to watch his own body being eaten by worms and turned to new uses while he would still be bound to it" (The Making of a Poet, p. 141), but I think that mischaracterizes its tone. Given the "cold-eyed" stoicism with which it confronts the fact of death, it represents rather the stoic ataraxia of "all passion spent." Perhaps the opening was prompted the poet’s recent traversal of the alpine pass that we also encounter in Little Dorrit, complete with a "Madam Tussaud's" display of frozen wanderers: "While all this noise and hurry were rife among the living travellers, there, too, silently assembled in a grated house half-a-dozen paces removed, with the same cloud enfolding them and the same snow flakes drifting in upon them, were the dead travellers found upon the mountain."60 Beddoes accordingly figures night as a shadowed Alpine peak, and the winds lost wanderers that are dying of inanition: The hour is starry, and the airs that stray, Sad wanderers from their golden home of day, On night's black mountain melt and fade away In sorrow that is music. (p. 74)

This offbeat start shouldn't blind us to the conventions of the Augustan night piece that underpin the poem. There day often figures as a source of disquiet and exposure, the "Nocturnal Rêverie" by Anne, Countess of Winchilsea, remarking that its "fierce Light disturbs, whilst it reveals."61 Beddoes, on the other hand, yearns for vanished radiance, the nostalgia of "the golden home of day," recalling Blake’s "sweet golden clime / Where the traveller's journey is done" (p. 221). His focus falls on the dying of the wind rather than of the light, and, since breezes are ontologically associated with motion, stasis spells the death of each, accompanied by a built-in lament. An absolute complementary structure defines these aerial dirges at the very moment that they become unreceptive to definition: "In sorrow that is music." Other airs, however, instead of wasting away, riffle the surface of the lake and pillow themselves on the wavelets they make. Nostalgia for the day then gives way to a lunar salute, the radiant "shade" of the moon (its "reflection") contrasting with the shade ("shadow") implicit in "night's black mountain":

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And so we reach the external calm essential to the meditative tone of the nocturne, the point where, to quote Thomas Parnell's "Night-Piece on Death," "The slumb'ring Breeze forgets to breathe, / The Lake is smooth and clear beneath."62 (Such restfulness can be distinguished from the opposing tradition of gothic Sturm und Drang that we find in Blair’s "Grave": "The Wind is up: Hark! how it howls! Methinks / Till now, I never heard a Sound so dreary."63) Beddoes for his part, having put the breezes to bed on their watery pillows, ushers in series of cognate references, winding his traductio from "sleep" through "is sleeping" to "soft sleep." This thrumming on the suspension of consciousness inoculates the fear of death, and, as it were, draws its sting. Sleep registers as a sort of Lethe, a current that drives its subject toward the unanxious oblivion. Beddoes hints this through the satiety of "drunk," and reinforces it with the intoxication of "strong": And every herb is sleeping in the glade;— They have drunk sunshine and the linnet’s song, Till every leaf’s soft sleep is dark and strong.

But the immobile herbage reminds the speaker of his irrecoverably vanished breezes: Or was there ever sound, or can what was Now be so dead? Although no flowers or grass Grow from the corpse of a deceased sound, Somewhat, methinks, should mark the air around Its dying place and tomb, A gentle music, or a pale perfume: For hath it not a body and a spirit, A noise and meaning?

As Donne documents the absence of any existential data in his "Nocturnal upon S. Lucy’s Day" ("If I an ordinary nothing were, / As shadow, a light, and body must be here"—p. 73), so Beddoes tries to find external memorials for that which has vanished into decreating stillness. His ruminations take form as adunata ("no flowers or grass / Grow from the corpse of a deceased sound"), preparing us for the poem’s chief concern, viz, the dematerialization of the flesh and release of the mind into a purely aerial existence. This unorthodox theology conceives burial as a

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purgatorial ordeal of consciousness, for whereas Donne’s "Anniversary" tells us that "When bodies to their graves, souls from their graves remove" (p. 42), Beddoes’s retain their sense of self and monitor their own decomposition. The thought discomfits, certainly, but it also offers eventual consummation in the vanishment of flesh: Some who have seen their bodies moulder away, Antediluvian minds,—most happy they, Who have no body but the beauteous air, No body but their minds.

This takes the biblical formula of moral endorsement—"beatus vir"—and transfers it from humankind to the idea of total dissolution, equated with paradisal life. And because the goal of human existence is a state of bodilessness, the opening meditation on the unrecorded and unrecordable "deaths" of the wind now comes into its own as a parable for the poem’s metaphysics. By the same token, echoes (which a sustained conceit defines as the ghosts of deceased sound) also provide a parable for the idea of twofold death—that of the animate body and its eventual reduction to nothingness: . . . and, when one doth hear it Twice born, twice dying, doubly found and lost, That second self, that echo, is its ghost. But even the dead are all asleep this time, And not a grave shakes with the dreams of crime:— The earth is full of chambers for the dead, And every soul is quiet in his bed;

Evoking Shakespeare’s 73rd Sonnet—"Death's second self that seals up all in rest" (p. 39)—Beddoes resumes the traductio that dwells on sleep, for now the repose of the buried dead complements the quiet herbage and sleeping breezes that rest above them. Because, as T. S. Eliot has observed, "human kind / Cannot bear very much reality" (p. 172), sleep has often euphemized the nullity of death, and provided the corollary that Beddoes derives from the evasion, viz, that death involves continued consciousness. Surveying the quiet Genevan landscape, he remarks that no grave is shaking with "the dreams of crime." That offers no guarantee against future agitation, however, nor does it preclude an awaking into post mortem consciousness that will track its own corruption. The earth becomes a catacomb, a vast amplification of the contained burial spaces in Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" ("Each in his narrow cell forever laid, / The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep"—p. 120).

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Not only that but the burial ground also becomes a hostelry that calmly and restfully accommodates its guests, as in Wilhelm Müller's "Das Wirtshaus," which had appeared one year earlier. This underground sleep goes hand-in-hand with a sense of claustrophobia, and we feel no surprise when Beddoes celebrates souls that have escaped the containing earth and diffused themselves into the "beauteous air." Metonymy compresses ages of decay into a single bone and a single worm, which shorthands the horror of decay by bringing forward the moment of release: even the newly interred can derive solace from the fact that their flesh is "weary" and therefore, like the world in Shelley’s song—"The world is weary of the past, / Oh, might it die or rest at last!" (p. 534)—able to accept the renovation in which its dismantlement will issue. The fact that "children’s spirits" play in its holes also points toward rejuvenation and recovered innocence: they recall Wordsworth’s "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality": "And see the Children sport upon the shore, / And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore" (p. 462). And while "the waters of the pit" have a sinister colour, they lack the corrosive and flammable qualities traditionally assigned to those of hell. If the "Lines Written at Geneva" project a state of life-in-death, the "Dirge" that follows propounds a corollary, the state of death in life. It begins with a suite of definitions so off-beam that they look ahead to E. E. Cummings's habit of making words behave against the grain of their functions: anyone lived in a pretty how town (with up so floating many bells down) spring summer autumn winter he sang his didn't he danced his did.64

Beddoes equates nouns and adverbs with comparable abandon in this lyric, possibly prompting Hardy to rework its aperçus in Far from the Madding Crowd: "With him the past was yesterday; the future to-morrow; never, the day after"65. However, Sergeant Troy's temporal units, occupying each side of an equation, fail to blur as dramatically as they do Beddoes's hands: To-day is a thought, a fear is to-morrow, And yesterday is our sin and our sorrow; And life is a death, Where the body’s the tomb, And the pale sweet breath Is buried alive in its hideous gloom. (p. 75)

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Beddoes takes up the "Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH"66 of "The Ancient Mariner," and, by the flick of a preposition, turns being into its mortal antitype. One of these inversions takes the Pauline theory of the flesh ("know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you?"—1 Cor. 6.19) and reworks it into a sepulchre, a definite article ("the tomb") giving the body an all-inclusive, all-enclosing metonymic force. It immures our "breath" (anglicizing the Latin "spiritus") through a conceit that makes life a de facto prison sentence, a proto-Kafkan vision of things had also been anticipated by Marvell: O who shall, from this Dungeon, raise A Soul inslav'd so many wayes? With bolts of Bones, that fetter'd stands In Feet; and manacled in Hands67

The poem continues in this subversive vein, and turns upside down the trope of consoling tokens of an afterlife. Giselle, the eponym of Adam's ballet, brings amaranthine lilies to Albert after her death—"The bending branch effect . . . enabled her to appear in a tree, as though floating, and drop flowers at her lover's feet"68—and in Franz Molnar’s Liliom, a father tries something similar: "Takes from his pocket a big red handkerchief in which is wrapped a glittering star from Heaven".69 Haydn's canzonetta, "The Spirit’s Song," had also anticipated the idea of post mortem reassurance: All pensive and alone, I see thee sit and weep, Thy head upon the stone, Where my cold ashes sleep.70

Needless to say, Beddoes overturns such facile consolations. Exploiting the exultant "volta" often found in elegy—"Weep no more, woeful Shepherds weep no more, / For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead"71—it offers no promise of reunion and resurrection, but rather turns life and death inside out. In "The Pilgrimage," Herbert had come to the conclusion that "After so foul a journey, death is fair / And but a chair,"72 and compensates for a horrible "before" with a gratifying "after." Beddoes goes one step further, and collapses the one into the other: Then waste no tear, For we are the dead; the living are here, In the stealing earth, and the heavy bier.

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"Stealing" suggests that the earth purloins the living and that it conducts these thefts with stealth. An aphasic hint of "sealing" also hovers in the background, blocking off all routes of communication from above or below. We move into the grave with the body, in contrast to the more usual funeral habit of offering a sociable feast—the reason why Chopin had the "left hand and the right hand gossip in unison"73 after the marche funèbre of his First Piano Sonata. No such respite for grievers in the "Dirge," however. Instead of being consoled by the ghost with messages of hope, as in the standard trope, they themselves address the departed and resume their lament, shifting focus to the misery of the life that lies ahead. Such misery makes death and life commutable counters: Dear ghost, so to die Is to live—and life is a worthless lie. Then weep we for ourselves, and wish thee good- bye.

Donner has appended rough drafts for a second strophe (p. 75), which give us a glimpse into the poet’s compositional procedures. His imagination pauses over the rhyme with "ball," uncertain whether to pursue the idea of an eidolon in a globular tear ("briny dew / From my brain shall fall") or to stress instead its destination on the "pall," the alternative rhyme that he holds in abeyance. He then puts them and their associated lines of argument to paper, and tries out different phrasings of the same idea—"On the grass which from thy ruins grew" as opposed to "On the fluted grass which from thy ruins grows." These tibicines (temporary metric scaffolds) allow him to marshal his thoughts and adjudicate between equally persuasive trains of thought. The first of the "Songs from 'The Second Brother'" begins grandiloquently, its style recalling Cleopatra’s discourse on Antony—"in his livery / Walk'd crowns and crownets: realms and islands were / As plates dropp'd from his pocket" (Antony and Cleopatra 5.2.90-92): Strew not the earth with empty stars, Strew it not with roses, Nor feathers from the crest of Mars, Nor summer’s idle posies.

Like the proem of Marvell's "Garden"—"How vainly men themselves amaze / To win the Palm, the Oke, or Bayes" (I:51)—Beddoes stresses the futility of social prestige, and makes the point more emphatic by dismissing the extravagance of its tokens. To strew the earth with stars is to recall the adunaton of Donne's "Go, and catch a falling star"74 and then

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to redouble the impossible by catching a veritable clutch of them and scattering their husks (as if stars were glowing capsules instead of gassy balls). This absurdity collapses on itself, and gives us pause to wonder if Beddoes must mean something else. I think he does. Working from the Timaeus myth of astral souls, and implying that "empty" stars are human bodies, he attacks the miles gloriosus ambition that seeks to cover the earth in corpses. While such conquerors often receive a floral tribute ("It was roses, roses, all the way, / With myrtles mixed in my path like mad"75), Beddoes turns the tokens into something both trivial and fleeting ("summer's idle posies") and then incongruously adds the "spolium" (in Lewis and Short, "the arms or armor stripped from a defeated enemy"). In the context of posies, however, "feathers from the crest of Mars" figure less as emblems of glory than as the trimming of an Easter bonnet. So far we have gained little sense of the poem’s subject, and the thematic suspense continues in the lines that follow. Here Beddoes draws a mysterious diurnal trajectory that he has partly derived from Jaques’s "Seven Ages of Man" (As You Like It 2.7.139 ff.): ‘Tis not the primrose-sandalled moon, Nor cold and silent morn, Nor he that climbs the dusty noon, Nor mower war with scythe that drops, Stuck with helmed and turbaned tops Of enemies new shorn

The Donner text inserts a period after "shorn," but that makes no sense. Since the accusatives require the anchorage of a transitive verb, the full stop should come at the end of the next line ("Ye cups, ye lyres, ye trumpets know"—p. 76). It brings with it the necessary éclaircissement, for only now do we realize that Beddoes has written a brindisi, and that the cups and their accompanying music (not unlike "the kettle-drum and trumpet" that "bray out / The triumph of his pledge" inHamlet 1.4.11-12) represent the pleasures of wine and song (no surprise that a homosexual poet should omit "woman," the third member of that traditional "hendiatris"). Hedonism defines itself by the ways of the world ("otium" versus "negotium"), ways that Beddoes has emblematized first in brutal military boastfulness and then in the dawn-to-dusk graph of human effort. Intoxication and industry represent opposite poles of experience, and drinking into the small hours can scarcely be said to square with workaday diligence. Hence Sir Toby's redefinition of a late night as an early rising in Twelfth Night 2.3.2—"Approach, Sir Andrew: not to be abed after

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midnight is to be up betimes; and 'diluculo surgere,' thou know'st"—which mocks a prudent tag from Lilly’s Latin Grammar.76 Beddoes’s bacchanalians also spurn the idea of "diluculo surgere," but even as he pours scorn on a life of aspiration, he can’t resist the impulse to lyricize the dismissal. The primrose sandals of his moon, associated as they are with the "cold and silent morn," probably came to inform Wilde's contrast between rout and aftermath in "The Harlot’s House"—"The dawn, with silver-sandalled feet, / Crept like a frightened girl."77 For while the "prim" of "primrose" properly derives from the Latin "prima," it evokes primness in conjunction with coldness and silence. Coldness and silence are chill enough, but we find no compensation in "the dusty noon," with its sense of parched exposure and effortful ascent. The referent of the pronoun "he" remains open-ended, and the climb in question seems at first to be that of Apollo’s chariot, which then morphs into Mars'. Its wheels, spiked with scythes, cut swathes through mediaeval battlefields, beheading Turk and Crusader alike. Beddoes has the laboriousness of "climb" collapse into the mortal plummet of "drops," and registers the meaninglessness of war (and religious difference) sub specie vini. The commutable helms and turbans function as metonyms for casualties on either side of the conflict, the speaker flooding them from consciousness with a jumble of cups, lyres and trumpets (the latter chalicelike in shape). This issues in the synaesthesia of pouring music, a conceit that originated in Gray's "Progress of Poesy," where a "rich stream of music winds along"78 before we see it "pour": Ye cups, ye lyres, ye trumpets know. Pour your music, let it flow, 'Tis Bacchus' son who walks below.

Comus, the god of revelry, sprang from the loins of Bacchus, and the flow of the wine and the level effortlessness of his walking below provide an alternative to the parabola of aspiration and decline earlier in the poem. The lyric that follows, though nominally free-standing, reveals affinities with its predecessor, for its "myrtle-crowned boys" and "Ivied maidens" belong in a bacchanale. It opens with a mock-military imperative that displaces striving with pleasure insofar as "Strike," far from signifying a violent attack, refers either to the clash of cymbals and crotala or to the percussive strumming of lutes: Strike, you myrtle-crowned boys, Ivied maidens, strike together: Magic lutes are these, whose noise

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Our fingers gather, Threaded thrice with golden strings From Cupid’s bow;

By suppressing the direct object, Beddoes gives a sexual colour to the poem: "strike together" reads as much like a command to copulate as a securement of musical unison. Mediaeval lute strings would have been fashioned from gut, but this imaginative aetiology, which cuts the statutory fifteen strings to an emblematic three, recalls Isa 2.4 ("they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks"), by turning a weapon (Cupid’s bow) into an instrument of harmony. After addressing the cortege in the second person, the speaker joins it in a first-person plural ("Our fingers gather"), the dimeter contraction like the clutch and release of digits on strings. Gathering also evokes ideas of harvest, of plucking noise from strings as grapes from vines; after which a fanciful aetiology of music comes into focus: And the sounds of its sweet voice Not air, but little busy things, Pinioned with the lightest feather Of his wings, Rising up at every blow Round the chords, like flies from roses Zephyr-touched; so these light minions Hover round, then shut their pinions, And drop into the air, that closes Where music’s sweetest sweet reposes. (p. 76)

The iconology of these "minions" recalls the bodiless cherubs of Renaissance Nativities. With their rounded heads and buoying wings, they evoke the "flies" (generic winged creatures, not Muscidae) that rise from breeze-riffled roses. But because they imp their wings from Cupid’s, they immediately change from Hebraic angels into classical putti, manifestations of the rounded bulb (angelic head) and wing-like tail of the quaver often invoked to emblematize music. In the lines written at Geneva, Beddoes had pondered the vanishment of sound into nothingness, and the same obsession resurfaces here. Air becomes a liquid closing ("cadencing") over the cherub/quavers as they vanish into a universe of silence ("Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter"79). Enclosing a more intense, supra-sensual experience, this space becomes a sanctum of notional rather than actual sounds, for sound, synonymous with movement, can't properly aspire to restfulness: "Where music’s sweetest sweet reposes."

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"With Music" is a kletikon or invitation poem, the future-tense verb at its start not so much a question as a request like the one that we encounter at the start of Mary Howitt's "Will you walk into my parlour?"80The speaker has searched out an ideal bower for his mistress, which, although differing in detail, offers the same voluptuous security and closure as Titania's in A Midsummer Night's Dream 2.2.253: Will you sleep these dark hours, maiden, Beneath the vine that rested Its slender boughs, so purply-laden, All the day around that elm In the mead, nightingale-nested, Which yon dark hill wears for an helm, Pasture-robed and forest-crested? (p. 76)

Acting as her major-domo, he seeks out the best accommodation in the landscape that he can find, and seemingly offers to guard her through the night (also in the manner of A Midsummer Night's Dream 2.2.25—"One aloof stand sentinel"). A grape-vine (if "purply-laden" applies to fruit rather than Wisteria trusses) indicates a landscape in which such plants grow wild and provide a signature of fertility and eroticism. We arrive at bower as the innermost ring of concentrically contained spaces, each a protective barrier against intruders. Beddoes might have taken his cue from Keats’s "Sleep and Poetry," which also builds a Chinese box of enclosing details: What is more tranquil than a musk-rose blowing In a green island, far from all men's knowing? More healthful than the leafiness of dales? More secret than a nest of nightingales?" (p. 42)

The speaker intends his maiden to occupy a central arbour, created by the vine that depends from an elm. It seems to retain the warmth that has built up "All the day" in the same way that cosy daytime sleep offsets the chill of Collins’s "Ode to Evening": For when thy folding star arising shows His paly circlet, at this warning lamp The fragrant Hours, and elves Who slept in flowers the day,81

Beddoes complements cosiness with a sense of safety, the "masculine" upstanding tree and the dependent vine once again reminiscent of A

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Midsummer Night's Dream—"the female ivy so / Enrings the barky fingers of the elm" (4.1.42-43), while the epithet "nightingale-nested," derived from "Sleep and Poetry," recapitulates the protection and security of the bower below. The fact that the elm grows on a hill provides an additional element of fortification, for it rises in the midst of an open meadow, its eminence like a sentinel fully armed, as the Arcimboldian collage makes plain: "Which yon dark hill wears for an helm, / Pasture robed and forest-crested." The irresistibility of the poem's invitation registers in the fact that a single sentence winds through seven lines, each attribute of the landscape (which Beddoes encapsulates in a participial phrase) docking on to it like the carriages of a train. The indicative verbs of the last three lines show that the maiden has at last taken up her place in the bower. Even so, despite all the speaker's elaborate precautions, night itself manages to enter the sanctum: There the night of lovely hue Peeps the fearful branches through, And ends in those two eyes of blue.

By "lovely hue" Beddoes must mean the indigo of the sky after sunset, which he anthropomorphizes by investing with a sense of sight. As its eyes track the corresponding eyes of the maiden, hyperbaton separates the verb from the preposition ("Peeps the fearful branches through") to convey its struggles through the foliage, and the transferred epithet ("fearful"), detaching fear from the trepid night, confirms its alarm at finding its own colour eclipsed by a blue more effulgent still. "End" not only marks the terminus of those vivid trajectories but also their extinction, for just as in The Rape of the Lock Sol "op'd those Eyes that must eclipse the Day,"82 so the maid's eclipse the blue of evening. However, in pursuing this Petrarchan compliment, Beddoes has forgotten that the maiden’s eyes ought properly to be closed in the sleep the bower has been designed to secure. The "Song of a Maid Whose Love Is Dead" probably received its title from the editor of The Athenaeum, where it appeared in 1832—or perhaps Beddoes himself revised the one that Kelsall appended to the text ("Love’s Last Messages"). In any event, it contains an important datum, "Maid" suggesting the "ruin" (and subsequent madness) of a woman who has had sexual congress out of wedlock: Merry, merry little Stream, Tell me, hast thou seen my dear?

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I left him with an azure dream, Calmly sleeping on his bier— But he has fled! (p. 76)

At the time that Beddoes wrote this, the interrogation of nature had become a favoured Romantic trope, as witness "Der Neugierige" ["The Enquirer"], which Schubert set to music: Ich frage keine Blume, Ich frage keine Stern. Sie können mir alle nicht sagen, Was ich erführ so gern. Ich bin ja auch kein Gärtner, Die Sterne steht zu hoch, Mein Bächlein will ich fragen, Ob mich mein Herz belog. [I will not ask a flower, Nor of the stars enquire, For no star or flow'r can tell me What I so much desire: For I am not a gardn'er, The stars too far above, My streamlet will I ask then, If blest will be my love.83

Published in by Wilhelm Müller in 1824, this came too late to have influenced Beddoes, but, two decades later, Tennyson still had use for such stylized interrogatories: 'Why lingereth she to clothe her heart with love, Delaying as the tender ash delays To clothe herself, when all the woods are green? [']84

Beddoes's use of questions arises not from the Romantic assumption that the nature shares the experience of humankind (and can therefore yield the answers), but rather from the speaker’s derangement. In her grief, she fails to acknowledge the death of her lover, and distracts herself through a protracted game of versicle and response: "Merry, merry little stream, / Tell me, hast thou seen my dear?" Here the epizeuxis intensifies the dissonant application of "merry" to the bearer of bad tidings, not least because it recalls Ariel’s song (The Tempest 5.1.93—"Merrily, merrily

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shall I live now"). In contrast to its ironically dancing motion, the bier projects the true situation of the poem. A long interval elapses between interrogation and reply, for when the next stanza arrives, the catafalque has given way to a well-established grave: ‘I passed him in his churchyard bed— A yew is sighing o’er his head, And grass-roots mingle with his hair.’ (p. 77)

This has a haunting quality comparable to "Rolled round in earth's diurnal course, / With rocks, and stones, and trees,"85 and shows the very process of dissolution as roots and hair become indistinguishable from each other. But because "bed" euphemizes "grave," the maid disregards these data of decay and persists in denying death of her lover. She adduces two alternative scenarios as she tries to ignore the truth. One centres on his faithlessness and the other on his having tormented her with his absence for the pleasure of "make-up sex" (as it is now termed). The "bower of stone" offers a paradoxical blend of soft, vegetative enclosure and an unyielding unresponsiveness hinting her subliminal sense of his being entombed. In the next exchange, the brook allows the maid still less room to manoeuvre past the facts ("He doth not speak, he doth not moan"), the double negation pointing to only one conclusion, especially since lover now lacks the capacity to make love, "moan" having some of the erotic colour of the "Ode to Psyche" ("Nor virgin-choir to make delicious moan / Upon the midnight hours"—Keats, p. 211). Possibly with the death of Cleopatra in mind, Beddoes conjures up a new figuration of Mors as a "grave snake." Such an image has multiple facets: the serpentine vector of mortality, an allusion to 1 Cor.15.55 ("O death, where is thy sting?") and the posthumous worm of corruption in Mark 9.44 ("Where their worm dieth not"). Ambiguity arises from the enallagic use of "flesh," which compares the fanged penetration of human tissue to the sheathing of a sword, while at the same time the snake fleshes (out) its own body by gorging on the corpse, and fleshes (in) its sting with that additional mass. It also expresses a droplet of venom by way of suicidal invitation to the maid: [‘]But, ere the grave snake fleshed his sting, This one warm tear he bade me bring, And lay it at thy feet Among the daisies sweet.’

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The mortal invitation seems all the more insidious for the warmth of the fluid (at odds with the coldness of death), and its metonymic singularity turns it into an emblem of mourning (compare "He gave to Misery all he had, a tear"—Gray, p. 140). Sympathetic self-slaughter accordingly presents itself as the only possible solution to the maid’s distress, especially since daisies have a strong association with graveyard turf. She fails to take up the invitation, however, ushering in a final strophe that shifts focus from the brook and redirects the interrogation to a more rarefied element: Moonlight whisperer, summer air, Songstress of the groves above, Tell the maiden rose I wear, Whether thou has seen my love.

The gender-change from "songster" to "songstress" in the Athenaeum text compromises the sexual dynamics of the text, for if it be a male zephyr that brings the envoi from the lover, it would better complement the maiden rose (displaced emblem of the speaker): 'This night in heaven I saw him lie, Discontented with his bliss; And on my lips he left this kiss, For thee to taste and then to die.'

I would imagine that this kissing of male by male lies behind the squeamish shift from "songster" to "songstress." But other features of the poem also issued a challenge to orthodoxy. Many readers of The Athenaeum would have felt shock at the presence of eros (rather than agape) in this nominally Christian paradise, and their conventional ideas of heaven would not have permitted the coming and going of its denizens, a feature found in the afterlife mythology of Lallah Rookh, where a peri leaves paradise and then returns: There fell a light more lovely far Than ever came from sun or star, Upon the tear that, warm and meek, Dewed that repentant sinner's cheek.86

Since the peri earns her readmission through that single tear of penitence, it might have prompted the parodic tear of poison that the grave-snake offers to the maid. The average Regency mind would have been equally discomfited by the Luciferian discontent of the lover, since the Christian tradition of heaven depended on a serene submissiveness, the self-

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surrender of Dante's Piccarda—"per questo regno, a tutto il regno piace / com’allo re ch’a sua voler ne invoglia. / E’n la sua volontade e nostra pace,"87 ["And please the King that here in-willeth us // To His own will; and His will is our peace"88]. Nor should we lose sight of an implicit suicide pact. "For thee to taste and then to die" not only violates the canon against self-slaughter but also activates the orgasmic meaning of "die" that we find, inter alia, in Donne’s "Canonization": "We die and rise the same, and prove / Mysterious by this love."89 According to Donner, the "Sonnet to Tartar was . . . among the last poems Beddoes wrote before leaving England" (p. xxviii) for Göttingen. Though modest in scale and scope, it lodges in the memory through its weave of parody with sentiment, and also by virtue of its very unusualness. Poems celebrating the lives (as opposed to the deaths) of pets have been comparatively rare, for while the elegiac ones make provision, as elegies must, for glimpses of the dead creature in life, they afford only glimpses. Few analogues for the Tartar sonnet come to mind. One is Cowper’s memorialization of his pet hare, its minutiae liberated from any impulse to moralize or divinize— His diet was of wheaten bread, And milk, and oats, and straw, Thistles, or lettuces instead, With sand to scour his maw.90

—and the other is the vignette of Smart’s cat in Jubilate Agno, which tries (unsuccessfully) to harness these neutral observations to a theological mandate: For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean. For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there. For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended. For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood. For fifthly he washes himself.91

Beddoes's sonnet, like these portions of poems, works in terms of simple portraiture, though the picture is layered with meditations on the difference between dogs and humankind. But whereas, say, Auden stops short at the divide— Dog The single creature leads a partial life, Man by his mind, and by his nose the hound; He needs the deep emotions I can give, I scent in him a vaster hunting ground.92

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—Beddoes bridges it with parallels. Most poets of the time would probably have shown reluctance to forge a metaphoric bond between flowers and dogs, but Beddoes, master of the catachresis, manages it with aplomb: Snowdrop of dogs, with ear of brownest dye Like the last orphan leaf of naked tree Which shudders in bleak autumn; . . .

Since white dogs become grubby in contact with soil, and since Tartar poses for his portrait in a state of radiant purity, snow must recently have fallen when Beddoes wrote the poem. Moreover, since snowdrops push up in February, it's probable that he noted these two matching whitenesses on a walk during that month. Be that as it may, we are left with an impression of intense complementaries, the unsullied brilliance of the one colour offset by the deepening superlative of the other—"brownest." Tartar seems to recapitulate a scene in which a brown trunk might have punctuated a blank expanse of snow, each element offering a reciprocal contrast of tone and tonelessness. The "orphan leaf" correlates with the shape of terrier’s ear, folded-over and triangular, while at the same time resonating with a line from Shakespeare: "When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang / Upon those boughs which shake against the cold."93 Perhaps that halfallusion tells Tartar to love that well which he must leave ere long— Beddoes being poised to leave for Germany. So much, then, for what, in the theory of contemplation, is called the "composition" or the assemblage of physical data. The next stage of the sonnet corresponds with the analysis of meditative method, moving from concrete to metaphysical issues. In the discourse about the divide between human beings and dogs, the graph of progression recalls that of Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," which first enumerates the experiential deficits of the figures on the vase, and then tallies up their advantages: Bold Lover, never never canst thou kiss, Though winning near thy goal—yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair. (p. 210)

Precisely the same pattern of concessive adverbs obtains in Beddoes's sonnet: though by thee,

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Of hearing careless and untutored eye, Not understood articulate speech of men, Nor marked the artificial mind of books, —The mortal’s voice eternized by the pen,— Yet hast thou thought and language all unknown To Babel’s scholars;

To convey the impenetrability of human speech to a dog's mind, Beddoes chooses a laboured Miltonic syntax, its hyperbatic suspensions and interruptions inverting and disconnecting the flow of the sentence. This makes human utterance seem crabbed and unspontaneous, and Beddoes does further damage to our species with "Babel's scholars," shorthand for the cross-purposed way in which humans relate (or rather fail to relate) to each other. While Beddoes wonders if Tartar spends his time speculating about the origins of the world, readers for their part must ponder the real reason for his fascination with the stone. Does its resemblance to a hunk of meat prompt his attentiveness? oft intensest looks, Long scrutiny o’er some dark-veined stone Dost thou bestow, learning dead mysteries Of the world’s birth-day, oft in eager tone With quick-tailed fellows bandiest prompt replies, Solicitudes canine, four-footed amities. (p. 77)

The human world, a world of laborious artifice, seems bent on shoring up fragments "against its ruin,"94 the "mortal's voice eternized by the pen" an index to our self-absorption. Tartar, by contrast, tackles much more profound questions about cosmogenesis, and, lacking the jealous rivalry that often bedevils human scholarship, readily exchanges ideas with his fellow dogs. "Quick-tailed" attests to the open-heartedness of the exchange, a pun on "quick" (in the Anglo-Saxon acceptation of "alive") set against "dead mysteries." Of course the sonnet loads the dice, but in that loading lies its charm. We know all the while that dogs often show aggression to their fellows, and know also that humankind has devoted more time and energy to the contemplation of rocks and cosmogonic mysteries than any terrier has. Even so, Beddoes teasingly makes us come off second best, as we would later come off second-best to lizards in D. H. Lawrence’s poem: "If men were as much men as lizards are lizards / they’d be worth looking at."95 Indeed one wonders there be a connection between the poems, since the lizard, instead of looking down on a stone like the terrier, looks up to the sky and listens "no doubt, to the sounding of the spheres"—1:524).

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To demonstrate that Tartar himself speaks quickly and to point, Beddoes sustains the Miltonic heaviness to the very end, "commonizing" grandiose abstract nouns into the plural: "With quick-tailed fellows bandiest prompt replies, / Solicitudes canine, four-footed amities." Those lines might give couplet-closure to the poem, but Beddoes has laced them into the sestet of a hybrid Anglo-Italian sonnet, starting with the Petrarchan chiastic rhyme, but shifting to the Shakespearian pattern of alternation. Christopher Ricks has remarked that the "four-footed silent interlocutor is apt to the dramatic monologue,"96 but (so far as I read it, at least) the poem seems to mock its own (grandiose) use of apostrophe. One hardly expects reciprocation when one uses that rhetorical device—one that turns, more often than not, upon the grandeur and inaccessibility of the objects it addresses. Tartar might well have responded to Beddoes’s different phonetic tones, and to a small repertoire of individual words, but Miltonic sentences would have meant nothing to him. The sonnet’s comic charm centres in his absorption in the stone, unconscious all the while of the incomprehensible commentary that he poet is delivering over his head.

CHAPTER SIX OUTIDANA PART 3

The final poem of the Outidana collection would probably have been "Pygmalion: The Cyprian Statuary," written, according to Donner "at Oxford in the latter half of May" in 1825—"the poet's last great effort before setting sail for Germany."1 It reconceives the original myth as a parable of artistic striving and immolation, taking its cue from Rousseau: "I wrote this Pig stuff this morng—what d'ye think of it? Don't look at J. J. Rousseau—his is much better, because prose. I have not hit what I aimed at—the beautiful philosophy of the story—but have fallen as usual into diffuseness and uninteresting delay." (Works, p. 601). One would search in vain for "beautiful philosophy" in the Greek sources, however: Pygmalion, son of Belus, fell in love with Aphrodite and, because she would not lie with him, made an ivory image of her and laid it in his bed, praying to her for pity. Entering into this image, Aphrodite brought it to life as Galatea . . .2

Robert Graves has forged this account from various authors. One of them, Apollodorus, makes no mention of a statue, and simply chronicles the fact that Cinyras married "the daughter of Pygmalion, King of Cyprus,"3 and while Arnobius comes closer to the received myth, his Pygmalion doesn't fashion the statue that obsesses him: Philostephanus states in his Cypriaca that Pygmalion, king of Cyprus, fell in love with an image of Venus, as if it were a woman. It was regarded as holy and venerated by the Cyprians from ancient times. His mind, his soul, the light of his reason, and his judgment were blinded, and in his madness, as if it were his wife, he would lift up the divinity to the couch.4

Only in Ovid do amans and artifex converge, Pygmalion carving a figure from ivory (rather than from the monumental marble favoured by Rousseau and Beddoes). His project arises from the petrifaction of the Propoetides, who, being the first prostitutes, have inspired him to a life of misogynistic celibacy:

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Sexual frustration therefore lies behind his impulse to construct a perfect woman: interea neveum mira feliciter arte sculpsit ebur formamque dedit, qua femina nasci nulla potest, operisque sui concepit amorem. [Meanwhile, with wondrous art he successfully carves a figure out of snowy ivory, giving it a beauty more perfect than that of any woman ever born.] (2:81-82)

Ovid's Pygmalion turns to image-making only in extremis, and we have to wait for Rousseau’s scène lyrique before encountering a fully-fledged artist, or rather an artist manqué, since the French poet presents him to us at the nadir of his inspiration: O mon génie! où es-tu? mon talent, qu'es-tu devenu? Tout mon feu s'est éteint, mon imagination s'est glacée ; . . .6 [O my genius, where are you? My talent, what has become of you? All my fire is extinguished, my imagination frozen over . . .]

But although Rousseau stands closer to Beddoes than any of his classical predecessors, one would err in assuming there to be much continuity between the two versions. The English poet gives the story a unique and peculiar twist, suggesting that "in order to share the life of his own creation, the artist must die"7—or so Donner claims, though I shall argue that Pygmalion escapes the grave. Crucial to the parable, rather, is the artist's vicarious suffering, the passion of Pygmalion in both acceptations of that word. But more of that later. The narrative, while not perfectly managed, has greater coherence and cogency than those in The Improvisatore, its moments of ecphrastic expansion and delay bearing a thematic weight that the comparable moments in earlier work sometimes lack. Even though the poet reproaches

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himself for "diffuseness" and "delay," his expatiations frequently work in harness with his larger project instead of diverging from it. The very subtitle bears this out, for in choosing "Cyprian" above "Cypriot," Beddoes has foregrounded the erotic colour of the epithet (associated with prostitutes), and drives the point home by stressing that near Salamis, "Beauty and love's paternal waves do beat / That sprouted Venus" (p. 78). A city beaten as much by "Beauty" as by "love’s paternal waves" (whatever they might be) is a city drenched in Venereal foam. Even its architecture seems more an exudation of the waves than something rationally planned, just as Galatea later autogenetically emerges from her rock instead of being carved from it: There stood a city along Cyprus’ side Lavish of palaces, an arched tide Of unrolled rocks; where the deities dwelled Their clustered domes pushed up the noon and swelled With the emotion of the gods within, As doth earth’s hemisphere, when showers begin To tickle the still spirit at its core Till pastures tremble and the river-shore Squeezes out buds at every dewy pore; (p. 78)

Beddoes qualifies the frontal security of "stood" through the lateral clinging of "along," the sense of spillage confirmed by the phrase "Lavish of palaces," as though they were pouring down the cliffs toward the sea ("lavish" derives from "lavasse," a deluge). The same watery implication recurs in the presentation of palaces as "an arched tide," a detail that, given the fact that classical Greek buildings are archless, invests Salamis with syncretic Gothic elements. Beddoes's "arched tide / Of unrolled rocks," because it arrests a moment from a continuum, comes close to Goethe's maxim that architecture is "frozen music."8 Both writers impart permanence to something fleeting, the German reading the Gothic arch as answering antiphons, the Englishman viewing its convergent stresses as a body of water that rears against an immovable object. An "arched tide / Of unrolled rocks" also creates the momentary image of rounded stones balanced upon each other ("unrolled" in that sense), but since dolmens have no place in Cyprian architecture, we are forced to reread "unrolled" as "unscrolled," which is to say, cut into paper-like ashlars. A sense of dynamism is evident also in the temples of Salamis, for while the Latinate sense of dome ("domus"=a dwelling) dominates the meaning, one can't altogether suppress the anachronistic mental image of Eastern Orthodox cupolas. Beddoes figures them as pregnant bellies or as

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living fungi, shaped by the immanence of the deities they house. While "emotion" registers in its primary sense of "feeling," it also evokes a force that presses outward ("ex movere"; "ex motum")—a temple forged miraculously from within itself in same the way that a mollusc builds its capsular shell out of its body. The rondure of the domes that push up into the sky matches the curve of the earth, for Beddoes gives us a typically extra-terrestrial take on images that, like fractal geometry, encompass one kind of roundedness within another. This gods'-eye vision of the earth presents the planet as a sponge expanding with moisture in a way that recalls the reverdie of The Canterbury Tales: Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote The droughte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licour, Of which vertu engendred is the flour;9

Beddoes's fantastically swelling earth undergoes a similar induration, its "still spirit" figuring as the Stoic anima mundi in hibernation, and its tickling (with a paronomastic hint at trickling), a return to sensation in that same presence. Zooming from an orbital view of the planet to a close-up in situ, he takes us into a temple bursting with richesse as much as with its immanent god: And there were pillars, from some mountain's heart, Thronging beneath a wide imperial floor That bent with riches; and there stood apart A palace oft accompanied by trees That laid their shadows in the galleries, Under the coming of the endless light, Net-like; . . .

The paratactic gesture of "And there were pillars" recalls a similar moment in "Kubla Kahn"—"And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills"10— and so brings to mind the exotic abundance of that poem. Furthermore, just as Beddoes had earlier suggested (and revoked) a "natural" architecture of heaped boulders, so "some mountain's heart" momentarily figures the pillars as stalagmites before forcing us to reconceive them in terms of the Greek orders. The implied rarity of the minerals from that heart suggests a lavishness against which the wooden ceiling strikes a false note—for how else could the "wide imperial floor" bend beneath its riches? That floor, an architectural solecism in and of itself, suffers still further from a hint of shoddy crafting. One wonders if Beddoes had

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properly thought through his structure or if he were simply slinging down details as they occurred to him. The Cyprians boast abundant skill and wealth, but, even so, their accomplishments pale in comparison with Pygmalion's. Standing apart from the others, his palace carries a hint of "Odi profanum vulgus et arceo" [I hate the uninitiate crowd and keep them far away],11 and underlines his disaffection from humanity at large. Beddoes drives this home through the catachresis "A palace oft accompanied". Because "oft" has a stronger temporal than a spatial charge, it creates an expectation of people forgathering, whereas it actually describes the way the trees match the rhythm of the colonnade. We miss that human presence all the more for having been led to expect it. The vegetation registers through shadows rather than as a tangible presence, a delicate touch that looks ahead to Tennyson. Compare, for example, "trees / That laid their shadows in the galleries, / Under the coming of the endless light" with "Mariana": "The shadow of the poplar fell / Upon her bed, across her brow."12 While shadows offer an atmospheric effect in their own right, they also bring the epistemological parable of Plato’s Republic to mind: "do you think our prisoners could see anything of themselves of their fellows except as shadows thrown by the fire on the wall of the cave opposite them?"13 They are in fact sense-data that originate in Pygmalion’s consciousness, but the open-ended formulation "who trod the marble" ("who" functioning like the Latin "quisquis") moderates the sense of his identity, and creates the sense of a person abstracted, of eyes blankly focussed on the floor. He exists at a remove from reality, absorbing data through tangential awareness, as Madeline does in "The Eve of St Agnes": . . . her maiden eyes divine Fix'd on the floor, saw many a sweeping train Pass by—she heeded not at all: . . .13

Pygmalion’s irregular hours ("night or day"), and the casual commutability of his light source ("lamp or . . . dayshine") point to a monomaniac tendency, and so explain his detachment from society at large. Donner objects to "such insipidities as 'sunless dayshine white'" (The Making of a Poet, p. 176), but there can be no denying that it accurately renders the way a fog can blot out the sun while at the same time transfusing its radiance—a virtuosic paradox that at once denies and admits the source of light. Pygmalion himself, however, appears indifferent to such climatic nuances, being more concerned with the inner weather of the mind. This causes his outer circumstances to blur into the same meaningless continuum that characterizes the life of Mrs Clennam in Little Dorrit: "All

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seasons are alike to me."14 Beddoes compounds Pygmalion's abstraction and indifference by recalling the isolato of Gray’s "Elegy" insofar as "brush the shaking ghostly leaves away" reworks "Brushing with hasty steps the dews away"15 The Platonic dematerializations of the real world register in a modal uncertainty that turns indicatives into subjunctives (the shadows apprehended out of the corner of an eye rather than by a frontal gaze)— "Which might be tendrils"–-while at the same time Beddoes’s prolepsis short-circuits the present to arrive at the future in "a knot of wine." Since this compressed phrase issues in an adunaton that defies imagining, Beddoes uses it to confirm Pygmalion’s epistemic remove from concrete issues, and also, perhaps to hint at a famous anecdote in Pliny: Descendisse hic [Parrhasius] in certamen cum Zeuxided traditur et, cum ille detulisset uvas pictas tanto successu, ut in scaenam aves advolarent. [This last, it is recorded, entered into a competition with Zeuxis, who produced a picture of grapes so successfully represented that birds flew up to the stage-buildings.]16

In Plato’s eyes, such a trompe l’oeil effect would deserve blame rather than praise, and this might account for the "faintness" of the "faint window vine," which, while it looks ahead to the etiolated vineyards in Little Dorrit ("the hot air barely moved their faint leaves"—p. 1), also owes a (graphic) "faintness" to the fact of its being a shadow, and therefore a copy. Resuming his narrative with another paratactic gesture à la "Kubla Kahn," Beddoes takes us into the palace. As Psyche lacked all knowledge of her mansion's provenance, so we, entering this one, are still in the dark about its owner, even though sculptural proxies crowd upon us from every quarter: —and round the hall And wandering stair-case, within every wall Of sea-ward portico, and sleeping chamber, Whose patient lamp distilled a day of amber, There stood or sate or made rough steeds their throne Immortal generations wrung from stone Alike too beautiful for life and death And bodies that a soul of mortal breath Would be the dross of.

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Forgetting the foursquare, geometric ordonnance of classical architecture, Beddoes has invoked mediaeval spiral steps and allowed the "wandering stair-case" to lead the eye forward in the absence of a guiding host. And just as in the palace of Balthasar an "alternative" sun created a world of artifice, so Pygmalion's remoteness from circadian rhythms registers in the "amber day" of his bedroom, where the transferred epithet of the "patient lamp" alerts us to the silent presence alongside it, patient in the current sense of the adjective, but also with the sense of suffering contained in its etymon "patiens." The many different kinds of statue attest Pygmalion's versatility, and not for nothing does Beddoes include the exacting equestrian variety, long the obsession of sculptors such as Leonardo, who had projected one "very like the Marcus Aurelius now on the Capitol,"17 and such as Bouchardon, whose equestrian statue of Louis XV didn't survive the French Revolution.18 The presence of a horseman in the palace accordingly presents Pygmalion as the fons et origo of an illustrious sculptural line. Sprezzatura allows him to toss off his rare and difficult achievements in abundance, the "roughness" of the steeds he sculpts open to two different constructions. One the one hand, it suggests a virtuosic command of texture that extends to the representation of horsehair, and on the other, by suggesting the wild temperament of the animals themselves, it underscores the control of the deities who mount them—able, like Orpheus, to "lead the savage race."19 Just as the "patient lamp" conveys the artist's unremitting labour, so the participle "distilled" hints at a process of slow maturation. Beddoes activates its liquidity by referring to "Immortal generations wrung from stone," a phrase that, while it recalls a proverb ("to get a good quantity of blood out of the stones"—Little Dorrit, p. 144), also turns that adunaton into miraculous fact. Blood-suffused flesh seems thus to emerge from marble whenever Pygmalion works it, an idea compounded by "generations," deriving as that does from "generatio," the act of procreation. But whereas humans offspring can suffer disfigurement and botching, the sculptor’s products arrive at immortality both because of their subject matter ("godlike") and because they can claim the imperishability of great art. Like di otiosi, the statues lead a life apart, born of stone, but unable, in consequence, to pass through the subsequent phases of that universal cycle, "Birth, and copulation, and death."20 Beddoes sets Pygmalion’s palace "within a garden hard by Salamis," its "accompaniment" of trees reminding us once again of Plato—"inter silvas Academi quaerere verum" [to hunt for truth in the groves of Academe]21—and his withdrawal from life finds further confirmation in

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the monastic colour of "retreat," which suggests the virginality of a "hortus conclusus": . . . such a fair retreat Lonely Pygmalion self inhabited Whose fiery chisel with creation fed The shipwrecked rocks; who paid the heavens again Diamonds for ice; who made gods who make men. Lonely Pygmalion: you might see him go Along the streets where markets thickest flow Doubling his gown across his thinking breast And the men fall aside; nor only pressed Out of his elbows' way but left a place A sun-room for him that his mind had space And none went near; none in his sweep would venture For you might feel he was but the centre Of an inspired round, the middle spark Of a great moon setting aside the dark And cloudy people. (pp. 78-79)

By ritually repeating the adjective "Lonely," Beddoes forces from it as much meaning as he can, not only the solitude of the isolato, but also the sense of uniqueness present in the Latin "solus." Loosely ravelled syntax allows "self" to function as an aphetic reflexive pronoun ("himself"), but its abbreviation also allows it to attach itself to the verb as a pronominal object ("self-inhabited"), suggesting once again a Platonic creative vision that generates truth from within. Pygmalion’s "fiery chisel," striking sparks from resistant stone, evokes many things—Promethean fire, technological prowess, the fire of inspiration, and, if we recall the plight of Dido, even the burning of frustrated love: "At regina gravi iamdudum saucia cura / volnus alit venis et caeco carpitur igno [But the queen, long smitten with a grievous love-pang, feeds the wound with her life-blood, and is wasted with fire unseen].22 The physics of De Rerum Natura also come to mind, for the sculpture represents the release of a latent energy: Tum porro quaecumque igni flamata cremantur, si nil praeterea, tamen haec in corpora condunt unde ignem iacere et lumen summittere possint scintillasque agere ac late differre favillam. [Then further whatever things are kindled and burnt up with fire, if nothing else, yet hide in their substance those bodies, which enable themto throw out fire and shoot up light and scintillate sparks and scatter embers all around.]23

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Pygmalion "feeds" life into the boulders of the Cyprian coast, extracting vital form from what would otherwise be vectors of formless death. The phonetic wrench from "wrecked" to "rock" suggests the threatening nature of the materials, while "shipwrecked" produces a double-take: fragmented rocks that resemble foundered vessels, and rocks that are covered with broken ships. By beneficiating this raw substance, Pygmalion repays with diamonds (a by-word for permanence) the comparatively worthless matter that the gods have placed at his disposal. These statues, far from deserving the Platonic slur of copied copies, approximate the archetypal absolute ("who made gods who made men"), a superhuman achievement that sets the maker apart from the throngs of Salamis. He passes through the latter like a heavenly body, and, needless to say, fails to register their presence, given the fact that the force of his being has turned inward. This issues in an oxymoronic compound of mental and emotional impulses: "his thinking breast." In "Kubla Kahn" an incantation also sets apart the inspired artist— And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes and floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise. (p. 298)

—but Beddoes's version of the trope is more muted. The "profanum vulgus" acknowledges his transcendence of its own accord by granting it "sun-room," a phrase that implies a mental process so brilliant and vivid that ordinary mortals can’t approach it. Isa. 9.2 comes to mind in this regard—"The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined"—while the reference to "a dark and cloudy people" activates memories of John 1.5:"And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not." Beddoes has segregated the men of the streets from the women cloistered within the adjacent houses, his conception of Cyprian society derived from its Attic equivalent: "Athenian woman lived in an almost Oriental seclusion, regarded with indifference, even contempt."24 He would have known, moreover, that"two complementary institutions coexisted, the family taking care of what we may call the material side, pederasty (and the courtesan) the affective, and to a degree the intellectual, side of a man's intimate life."25 Pygmalion's fame irradiates both the public

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and private domain, however. While the male merchants give him "sunroom" in the streets, their wives and daughters crane to glimpse his numinous presence. Pygmalion's artistic achievements, verging on the incredible, turn him into a thaumaturge, the sight of whom "blesses" the women's eyes: As he went along The chambered ladies silenced the half-song And let the wheel unheeded turn and skim To get their eyes blest by the sight of him. So locks were swept from every eye that drew Sun for the soul through circles violet-blue Mild brown or passionate black.

The bizarrerie of this passage makes it trench on a kenning, the interpretative key being the "circles" (irises) that admit actual and "spiritual" photons at one and the same time ("Sun for the soul"). Those polychrome irises (hinting at Pygmalion’s appeal to the whole range of feminine temperaments) are implicitly contrasted with the blank eyeballs of statues, Platonically raised above such accidental data. Shelley had drawn a similar distinction in "Adonais"—"Life, like a dome of manycoloured glass, / Stains the white radiance of Eternity"26—and, just as Pygmalion’s imagination moves in the blank, primal light of heaven, so he functions as an unshakeable touchstone in Cyprian society, looking ahead to the way the "unstilled world still whirl[s] / About the centre of the silent Word" in "Ash Wednesday" (Eliot, p. 96): Still, discontent, Over his sensual kind the sculptor went Walking his thoughts. Yet Cyprus’ girls be fair; Daybright and evening-soft the maidens are And witching like the midnight and their pleasure Silent and deep as midnight’s starry treasure. Lovely and young, Pygmalion yet loved none. His soul was bright and lonely as the sun Like which he could create— (p. 78)

The pejorative meaning of "sensual" clearly obtains here. Pygmalion stands apart from his fleshly fellows as Hamlet from the court of Elsinor, the word "kind" affirming and subtracting likeness in the same breath ("A little more than kin, and less than kind"—1.2.65). "Walking his thoughts" anticipates Victor Hugo's "Je marcherai les yeux fixés sur mes pensées,"27 and admits two complementary constructions. On the one hand Pygmalion

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exercises his mind over the sensuality that a Platonic artist must expunge, and on the other he inhabits a plane akin to that of the aspirant emperor in 1.2.133-36 of Julius Caesar: Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world Like a Colossus, and we petty men Walk under his huge legs, and peep about To find ourselves dishonourable graves.

Since Beddoes classifies Cyprian beauties as "Daybright and evening soft," and since he depicts Pygmalion both as enjoying "sun-room" and as the "middle spark / Of a great moon," one or other physical type should appeal to him, but he remains indifferent to both. This coldness seems all the more striking for the intensely sensual imagery with which Beddoes besets him—"midnight" functioning as a displaced reference to "midriff" ("their pleasure / Silent and deep as midnight’s starry treasure")—an image as daringly explicit that conveying the congress of Madeline and Porphyro ("and like a throbbing star / Seen mid the sapphire heaven's deep repose: / Into her dream he melted"—Keats, p. 205). Pygmalion, however, like Shakespeare's vestal enthroned in the west, passes on in "maiden meditation, fancy-free" (A Midsummer Night's Dream 2.1.164). Beddoes explains the sculptor’s spiritual exaltation in luminous terms that recall Plotinus: "the Immortals themselves prevented, guiding you on the straightgoing way to the celestial spheres, pouring down before you a dense shaft of light that your eyes might see from amid the mournful gloom."28 Pygmalion's inner sun, indeed, has the creative fecundity that the middle ages attributed to the real sun which they thought able to breed life out of light—"Let her not walk i' th' sun: conception is a blessing"(Hamlet 2.2.184-86)—and it displaces his own personality: and in its might There lived another Spirit wild and bright That came and went; and when it came, its light On these dim earthy things, turn where he will, Its light, shape, beauty were reflected still. Daytime and dark it came—like a dim mist Shelling a god it rolled, and ere he wist It fell aside, and dawned a shape of grace And an inspired and melancholy face Whose lips were smile-buds dewy—into him It rolled like sunlight, till his sight was dim And it was his heart and soul again, Not seen but breathed.

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This spirit, immeasurable and uncapturable ("came and went"), recalls the godhead that, like the wind, "bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit" (John 3.8), and also recalls Shelley's "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty": The awful shadow of some unseen Power Floats though unseen among us,—visiting This various world with as inconstant wing As summer winds that creep from flower to flower,— Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower, It visits with inconstant glance Each human heart and countenance; (p. 569)

Shelley's "Spirit of Delight," intellectual beauty by another name, similarly comes and goes: Rarely, rarely, comest thou, Spirit of Delight! Wherefore hast thou left me now Many a day and night? (p. 687).

And into these divergent sources Beddoes has woven yet another syncretic element, the pantheism of "Tintern Abbey" ("A motion and a spirit, that impels / All thinking things, all objects of all thought, / And rolls through all things"29), for Pygmalion's daemon likewise "rolls," and evokes what Wordsworth calls the "light of setting suns." That radiant conspicuity finds itself qualified, however, by cloudiness and obfuscation that originate in a different biblical source, Ex. 19.9—"Lo, I come unto thee in a thick cloud." And Beddoes seems also to have recalled the theophany in "Sleep and Poetry": No one who once the glorious sun has seen, And all the clouds, and felt his bosom clean For his great Maker's presence, but must know What 'tis I mean . . . (Keats, p. 43).

The mysterious emanation in Keats's poem— And sometimes like a gentle whispering Of all the secrets of some wondrous thing That breathes about us in the vacant air; So that we look a round with prying stare, Perhaps to see shapes of light, aerial limning,

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And catch soft floatings from a faint-heard hymning; (p. 43)

—might have prompted the indeterminacy of the "shape of grace" in "Pygmalion, " which encompasses both the corporeal, classical kind of grace, and that of Christian dogma. Beddoes has furthermore derived the mist that "shells" the spirit from the mandorla, the almond-shaped aureole that encloses the risen Jesus in Renaissance iconology. While mediaeval bestiaries claim that eagles renew their sight by flying toward the sun, Pygmalion's daemon does the very reverse, all but blinding him by the insights it affords ("It rolled like sunlight till his sight was dim") and displacing material experience with an impalpable spirituality ("And it was in his soul again, / Not seen but breathed"). Having completed this abstract discourse on artistic inspiration, Beddoes reverts to the topographic mode of the opening: There was a grassy plain A pasture of the deer, Olympus' mountain Was the plain's night, the picture of its fountain; Unto which unfrequented dell and wood Unwittingly his solitary mood Oft drew him. In the water lay A fragment of pale marble, which they say Slipped from some fissure in the agued moon Which had caught earth-quake and a deadly swoon When the sun touched her with his hilly shade. Weeds grew upon it and the streamlet made A wanton music with its ragged side And birds had nests there.

Since Muir's Historical Atlas Ancient and Classical locates "Olympus M[ons]" on the Greek mainland at a point midway between "Thessalia" and "Bottiaïs,"30 and since Beddoes was classically literate, he has chosen to reshape geography, correlating the official home of the gods with Pygmalion's palace, which, as we’ve seen, is also graced by "Immortal generations." The deer references (later we encounter "the deer-shading formless valley-rock") stir memories of Cowper— I was the stricken deer, that left the herd Long since; with many an arrow deep infixt My panting side was charg'd, when I withdrew To seek a tranquil death in distant shades.31

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—and of Jaques's "poor sequester'd stag" (As You Like It 2.1.33). These confirm Pygmalion as an isolato, segregated by sensibility and achievement from the Cyprian "herd," and simultaneously attracted to the sunless lee of the mountain, starkly rendered as its "night," a fascination with "distant shades" also having marked the poets of Sensibility: Where'er the oak's thick branches stretch A broader browner shade; Where'er the rude and moss-grown beech O'er-canopies the glade, (Gray, "Ode on the Spring" p. 50)

By favouring "unfrequented dell and wood," moreover, Pygmalion achieves the intense mental activity associated with the solitary life, a point that Wordsworth had made before him: For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, Thy flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude. (p. 149)

The pool that mirrors Olympus also lodges a "paltum," which is to say, an object venerated because of its extra-terrestrial origin. Standing up amid the reflected image of Olympus, the stone that will yield the image of Galatea is also, in a sense, the dwelling of a goddess. However, Beddoes immediately darkens that classicality with a hint of Macbeth 4.1.27-28— "Silver'd with the moon's eclipse"—for the paltum has also originated in inauspicious circumstances. By giving the sun a "hilly shadow," Beddoes irregularizes its spherical shape, and stresses the "ragged" side of the rock, and the "wanton" ("irregular") rhythm of the fountain that plays upon it. Weeds and shaggy nests (presumably of cormorants) compound our sense of a chaotic natura naturans out of which the perfected natura naturata of the statue will emerge: One still eventide When they were perched and sleeping passed this man Startling the air with thoughts that over-ran The compass of his mind; writing the sand Idly he paused and laid unwitting hand On the cold stone. (p. 80)

"Over-ran" conveys ideas both of uncontrolled invasion and of abundance—a fountain overrunning its brim—and suggests that a numinous force has possessed its passive human vector. "Compass" also

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opens itself to dual constructions. Turning a ragged paltum into statue might at first seem like the fiat lux in Wallace Stevens's "Anecdote of the Jar"—"It made the slovenly wilderness / Surround that hill"32—but there are occasions when wilderness will defy civilizing impulses and render impotent the vessels of art. "Compass," construed as a pair of dividers, points to reason’s inability to measure the creative act that takes place in spite of itself. One thinks at once of Blake's image of Urizen’s measuring the void, just as one thinks of Jesus when Pygmalion writes in the sand ("Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground"—John 8.6) Moreover, by omitting the preposition "in," Beddoes creates the adunaton of "righting the sand," an impossibility that recalls the "stairs of sand" in The Merchant of Venice (3.2.85) and the "rope of sands" in Herbert’s "Collar."33 While no force can regulate those impressionable and transient grains, the "diamond-hard" texture of the paltum commands the attention of a man who extracts permanence out of the ephemeral (we recall that he has "paid the heavens again / Diamonds for ice"). His contact with the stone seems fortuitous, his hand "unwitting" because his mental activity has trumped physical sensation, but it also underlines the dramatic irony of the encounter. Having already imparted a supernatural colour to the paltum through a lunar eclipse, Beddoes invokes an additional phrase from the cauldron scene in Macbeth, where "cold stone" provides residence for a toad. A narrative elision leaves us guessing as to how Pygmalion conceives the statue-to-be, for Beddoes focuses instead on the task of transportation, undertaken without delay so as to index the urgency of the enterprise: That night his workmen wrought With iron under it and it was brought, This dripping quarry while the sky was starry Home to the weary yearning statuary.

After using a chiasmus ("wrought . . . it . . . it . . . brought") to centre and steady the stone with syntactical "ropes," Beddoes turns its transportation to Salamis into a cortège like those that designed to greet colonized deities in ancient Rome. Ordinarily "quarry" would signify the geographical matrix of a sculptor’s material, but here the meaning extends to the substance itself, blending it with "quarry" construed as the "object of pursuit." Internal rhymes ("quarry"/"starry"; "weary"/"statuary") notionally shorten the couplets into dimeter and trimeter units to produce a stretta, an acceleration in the pace that suggests the eagerness of the artist. That "yearning" hints at the idea of an epithalamion, for the stone is

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proleptically en route to Pygmalion’s marriage bed. Since Beddoes has earlier informed us about the perpetual "day of amber" in his bedroom, it clearly doubles up as a studio, and it is there that he launches on his project without delay, once again disregarding the circadian rhythms of the world outside it: He saw no sky that day, no dark that night For through the hours his lamp was full of light, Shadowing the pavement with his busy right; Day after day they saw not in the street The wondrous artist, some immortal feat Absorbed him.

Beddoes works once more with strategies of displacement and indirection, Pygmalion’s hand registering only through its a shadow (like those cast by the vines earlier in the poem). It’s almost as if we were being protected from an ineffable blaze of divinity, our forcibly averted gaze like the smoked glass that spares our retinas when we look at the sun. The activity of the right hand confers an auspicious colour on the sculpting, for under Lewis and Short’s adjectival lemma for "dextera or dextra" we read that "the Greeks regarded an omen on the right as favorable)," which gives rise to the secondary meaning of "favorable, propitious, fortunate." And under the substantive lemma, "the right hand" figures as "a sign of greeting, of fidelity; a symbol of strength and courage," which explains why it figures in a sacral oath Horace’s Epistles I.vii: "Quod te per Genium dextramque deosque Penatis / obsecro et obtestor" [But by your genius, by your right hand and household gods, I implore and entreat you].34 An actual sculptor would naturally rely on both hands, but Beddoes, to foreground ideas of auspiciousness, all but suppresses the fact that real statues fashioned in real time place a huge physical burden on their creators, and require the exercise of all their limbs. Pygmalion’s labouring night and day confirms his monomania, but because any studio-bound dedication to his art could open him to the charge levelled against the Augustans in "Sleep and Poetry"— Ah dismal soul’d! The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll’d Its gathering waves—ye felt it not. The blue sea Bared its eternal bosom, and the dew Of summer nights collected still to make The morning precious: beauty was awake! Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead To things ye knew not of,—were closely wed

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To musty laws lined out with wretched rule And compass vile: (Keats, pp. 46-47)

—Beddoes sends him into the country on missions of self-refreshment. This re-establishes his true Romantic credentials, for Wordsworth himself had specified similar priorities in "The Tables Turned": Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books; Or surely you'll grow double: Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks; Why all this toil and trouble? The sun, above the mountain's head, A freshening lustre mellow Through all the long green fields has spread, His first sweet evening yellow. (Wordsworth, p. 377)

Thus it is that Pygmalion repeatedly goes abroad when the rest of Salamis is enjoying the siesta: And yet often in the noon When the town slept beneath the sweltering June —The rich within; the poor man on the stair— He stole unseen into the meadow’s air And fed on sight of summer—till the life Was too abundant in him and so rife With light creative he went in alone And poured it warm upon the growing stone.

The parenthesis about the "two nations" in the city, one segment of the population sheltered from the heat, the other exposed to its discomfort, alerts us to the poet’s latent radicalism. It anticipates Mrs Alexander’s "All Things Bright and Beautiful" ("The rich man in his castle, / The poor man at his gate"), but instead of appending her notorious theodicy ("He made them, high or lowly, / And ordered their estate"35), lets the inequality register as a naked, disturbing fact. Galatea might not in herself trigger social change, but by including the datum here, Beddoes hints that divinely inspired art might in fact transform the world along Shelleyan lines: Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon present; the words which express what they understand not; trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire;

the the the the

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influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.36 Beddoes conveys Shelley’s sense of this hierophantic function by paraphrasing the Nicene Creed, its clauses about the "Light of Light" and "Very God of Very God"37 influencing the "light creative" that, having been received from above, Pygmalion transfuses into his creation. "Light creative" also owes something to Racine's "Cantique," in which the divinity of "lux perpetua" ("Jour éternel de la terre et des cieux"38 [Everlasting light of earth and heaven]), provides both warmth and enlightenment—"Répands sur nous le feu / de ta grâce puissante" [Pour on us the fire / of your powerful grace] (p. 10). The "magic chisel" recalls such enchanted fairy-tale automata as the self-playing harp in "Jack and the Beanstalk" and the self-propelling broomstick in Goethe's "Zauberlehrling"—"Auf zwei Beinen stehen! / oben sei der Kopf"39 [Stand on two legs, / With your head up high]. The artist, a passive vector of mysterious force, has little conscious engagement with his task, and a superabundant vitality drizzles down from above and on to the stone. The latter, in a parable of Romantic organicism, effortlessly "grows" into the effigy, a marked departure from the laboriousness and uncertainty of Rousseau’s Pygmalion: "Quel tremblement! Quell trouble! Je tiens le ciseau d’une main mal assure... je ne puis ... je n’ose ... je gâterau tout" (p. 1226). Beddoes intensifies the mystic nature of the process by stressing its solitude ("With light creative went he in alone"), a solitude at odds with the language of sexual congress and penetration that prompts Christopher Ricks to talk of a great work of erotic shaping, itself both flying and manifold (amazing epithets for the rigor of a chisel), with the perils of "too abundant" and "rife" converted into the purely creative (the syntax too is manifold, so that it is not clear at first whether the words "and so rife" mean "and so rife" or "and so rife"); with the frank eroticism of "poured it warm" and "thrust and gashed" tempered by its not being dwelt upon but at once followed by the life of great nature.40

An elaborate Homeric simile compares the budding of an (apparently) lifeless stock in winter with the statue's inscrutable evolution out of an (actually) lifeless stone, a conceit that might have inspired Oscar Wilde's "Nightingale and the Rose," not least because it also involves a sacrificial transfusion of the artist’s life:"If you want a red rose," said the Tree, "you must build it out of music by moonlight, and stain it with your own heart'sblood. You must sing to me with your breast against a thorn."41 It goes without saying that statues, especially given the high finish dictated by

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Regency taste, involve considerable physical exertion protracted through time: "After the initial stages of roughing out, a sculptor sets about defining a sculpture by progressing through a variety of chisels, drills and rasps. The surface is then given its translucent glow by being polished with pumice stone".42 On the other hand, Beddoes’s Galatea, like Oscar Wilde's rose, seems all but "built out of music by moonlight," or, to use his actual words, out of "thin sun-beams and the airy shower: no cloud e’er wept So fast, so thick, so light upon the close Of shapeless green it meant to make a rose— And as insensibly out of a stick Dead in the winter-time, the dew-drops quick And the thin sun-beams and the airy shower Raise and unwrap a many-leaved flower And then a fruit—So from the barren stock Of the deer-shading formless valley-rock, This close stone-bud, he, quiet as the air, Had shaped a lady wonderfully fair.

Though clearly remembering the animism of "Kubla Khan" ("As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing"— Coleridge, p. 297), Beddoes has moderated "so fast, so thick" by decelerating toward an unexpectedly delicate climax ("so light"). He has also recalled the "weeping cloud" that "fosters the droop-headed flowers all" in Keats’s "Ode on Melancholy" (p. 220), and a similar passage from De Rerum Natura: postremo pereunt imbres, ubi eos pater Aether in gremium matris Terrai praecipitavit: at nitidae surgunt fruges, ramique virescunt arboribus, crescunt ipsae fetuque gravantur; [In fine the raindrops pass away when father Ether has cast them into the lap of mother Earth: but bright crops arise, the branches upon the trees grow green, the trees also grow and become heavy with fruit.]43

The "dew-drops quick" not only form with speed but also quicken in the Anglo-Saxon sense of that verb, aided by a delicately attenuated sunlight ("thin sun-beams") and an "airy shower" that recalls the "smalle raine"44 of a celebrated lyric, more an exhalation of vapour than a downpour. By the time the simile has run its course and deflected our attention from an inscrutable act of creation, we discover that the statue is done: "he, quiet as the air, / Had shaped a lady wonderfully fair." Pygmalion, like Lucretius' "pater aether"—"quiet as air"—has duplicated

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the miracle of the rose on the winter stock. The image he has made defies its marble origins in a way no longer fashionable to post-Modernist eyes: "A statue may represent a man in a lounge suit, but, if it is made of stone, both flesh and cloth must be translated into terms of stone: stone must not be tortured into an imitation of flesh and cloth".45 But to grasp the poet’s intention here, one must think rather of Bernini’s translucent manipulations of stone, as witness the robe of his Ludovica Albertoni, the "tortured angularity"46 of which flies in the face of Eric Newton's strictures. The Neapolitan's virtuosity in coaxing fine detail from heavy rock—"all Rome rushed to view [the] miracle"of the "delicate marble leaves sprouting from [Daphne’s] fingers and hair"47—seems to have inspired Beddoes's conception of Pygmalion as thaumaturge Many poets, Ben Jonson among them, have invoked snow to measure the beloved's complexion—"Ha' you mark'd but the fall o' the Snow / Before the soyle hath smutch'd it?"48—but, like marble, the other favouredcomparison when it comes to female flesh, it courts ideas of inhumanity and chilliness, as when Dickens makes Mrs Merdle "a woman of snow" (Little Dorrit, p. 240). This, needless to say, works against any erotic charge. But since limestone with "impurities in the form of clay, other sedimentary material, or minerals" changes "into colourfully veined marbles,"49 Beddoes chooses to offset its whiteness with touches of blue: —a delicate delight For all her marble symmetry was white As brow and bosom should be; save some azure Which waited for a loving lip's erasure Upon her shoulder to be turned to blush. (pp. 80-81)

There are two ways of reading that "azure"—either as an index to its purity (as blue tones figure in the whitest snow) or to a translucency that discloses the stone's internal veins. The latter relates back to the Spanish notion of "sangre azul," a measure of "aristocratic" pallor that also figures in Oscar Wilde's lyric "Le Panneau": "Just where the yellow satin shows / The blueveined flower of her throat" (Wilde, p. 805). Beddoes imparts an altogether more sensual colour to the idea, however, when he shifts from cold, distancing blue to warm, advancing red, and so turns the "azure" to a "blush." Thus does the stone begin to approximate living tissue, as in Henry Milman’s meditation on the Apollo Belvedere. As an Oxford student devoted to poetry, Beddoes would have been familiar with this poem, the Newdigate Prize-winner of 1812: Through heaving vein no mantling life-blood flows,

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But animate with deity alone, In deathless glory lives the breathing stone.50

Milman also anticipates the warming of "cold marble" into notional flesh: Mighty Ephesian! with an eagle’s flight Thy proud soul mounted through the fields of light, Viewed the bright conclave of Heaven’s blest abode And the cold marble leapt to life a god:

By reddening the bluish stone through the pressure of lips (rather than the application of pigment), Beddoes looks ahead to the statue's animation, while the simile ("As if one gush / Of life had washed her") begins the transfusion of Pygmalion’s vitality into his creation. That "Gush / of life" would strike a repellent note if visualized as a torrent of blood, but we should think instead of a colourless ichor like the balm in Donne’s "Nocturnal upon S Lucy’s Day"—"The world's whole sap is sunk: / The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk"51—and in one of his sermons: "Now Physitians say, That man hath his Constitution, in his Complexion, a naturall virtue, which they call Balsamum suum, by which any wound a man could receive in his body, would cure it selfe."52 Galatea’s life-likeness has the makings of a tragedy, however, and prompts that topos of universal sympathy we find in the "Stabat Mater": Quis est homo, qui non fleret Christi Matrem si videret In tanto supplicio?53 [Who is the man who would not weep If he saw the mother of Christ Undergoing such torment?]

Beddoes uses the phrase to stress the inevitability of Pygmalion's suffering when, like Zeuxis' birds, unwittingly drawn to painted grapes, he falls in love with a life-like deception: Who could help a sigh At seeing a beauty stand so life-lessly But that it was too beautiful to die?

Such perfection forces her into the limbo occupied by all Pygmalion's oeuvre—"Alike too beautiful for life and death" (p. 78)—his statues'

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immortality "All breathing human passion far above" (Keats, p. 210), and therefore a version of immutable death. At this point, Beddoes embeds an ode within the narrative matrix of the poem, its apostrophe and appositive honorific phrases at once a prayer to, and lament for, the man who eclipses the power of Zeus: Dealer of immortality Greater than Jove himself, for only he Can such eternize as the grave has ta’en And open heaven by the gate of pain: What art thou now, divine Pygmalion? Divine! gods counting human.

The apparent misplacing of "only" creates a ripple of contrary meaning, for while the subject would appear to be "Jove," the adverb's limitation applies not to his person but to his possible actions—"for he can eternize only such as the grave has taken." Because the gods themselves acknowledge the superior force of ananke, Jove can confer immortality on mortals only after they have died. But another meaning of the "misplaced" adverb suggests that Pygmalion (rather than Zeus) can circumvent the mortality of those he sculpts through his eternizing art, his "limae labor et mora" [the toil and tedium of the file]54—which is to say, his painstakingness rather than his experience of corporal duress. This by no means excludes physical suffering, for Pygmalion has opened heaven by "the gate of pain"—an apparent allusion to "O salutaris Hostia / Quae caeli pandis ostium" [O saving Victim opening wide / The gate of heaven to all below]55—giving a soterial force to the artist's pain, the willed surrender of his own life so as to animate his statue. However, at the very point that the sculptor arrives at godhead through his art, his mortality asserts itself, and an antimeric pattern aligns the achievement of his spirit with the failure of his flesh: Thou hast done That glory which has undone thee for ever, For thou art weak and tearful and dost shiver Wintrily sad and thy life’s healthy river, With which thy body once was overflown, Is dried and sunken to its banks of bone.

"Wintrily sad" takes us back to the barren stock of the Homeric simile since, having created an equivalent miracle, Pygmalion himself becomes infertile. Beddoes balances the immortality of the statue against the irreversible loss of the "balsamum" ("life's healthy river") that has flowed

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into the stone ("as if one gush / Of life had washed her"), and odic triumphalism yields to elegy. When carving Galatea, Pygmalion had "fed on sight of summer": now he shivers with cold, his weakness and tearfulness reminiscent once again of Donne's "Nocturnal": The general balm th'hydroptic earth hath drunk, Wither, as to a bed's-feet, life is shrunk, Dead and interred . . . (p. 72)

The "banks of bone" convey hardened, inarable earth on the one hand, and, on the other, the skeleton of a man who has come to a river for refreshment, and, finding it dry, died of thirst. "Sunken" suggests the recession of the water into its rocky bed and the collapse of dried-out cheeks against the armature of the skull. This physical depletion doesn't quite accord with the effortlessness that has characterized Galatea’s creation. Beddoes might salute Pygmalion as a man "greater than Jove," but who if not Jove shaped the statue in the first instance when he used the sculptor as a passive instrument? He carved it not; nor was the chisel's play That dashed the earthen hindrances away Driven and diverted by his muscle's sway; The winged tool as digging out a spell Followed a magnet, wheresoe'er it fell, That sucked and led it right—

Just such superhuman unerringness and unmeditated perfection marked Mozart's own creative method, as Salieri observes in Amadeus, though it's doubtful if Beddoes would have known this fact: She had said that these were his original scores. First and only drafts of the music. Yet they looked like fair copies. They showed no corrections of any kind. It was puzzling—then suddenly alarming. . . . What was evident was that Mozart was simply transcribing music completely finished in his head. And finished as most music is never finished. . . . Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall.56

Just as Mozart's manuscripts (unlike the tortured drafts of Beethoven) came into being without any sense of effort, so Galatea has enjoyed a labour-free birth. Michelangelo had viewed sculpture as the act of releasing "a form that was trapped within the block of marble"57; here, by contrast, somebody (or something) other than the sculptor himself has

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extracted Galatea from her stone matrix. Only later does the physical price of her creation become apparent, though the liquidity of "suck" (not ordinarily connected with magnetism) has earlier hinted that Pygmalion's life force drains into his artefact. Marble, a substance noted for its radiant whiteness, doesn't ordinarily evoke the idea of earth, but because Beddoes here calls it "earthen hindrance," he superimposes a Genesis creation-act on the process of sculptural excision, and so activates the traditional equation of flesh with clay (the etymon of "Adam"). This relates Pygmalion to Prometheus, who also created human beings from clay, and Robert Graves cross-refers his myth with another concerning a life-like effigy: "Talos is the son of an ashtree nymph, because ash-charcoal yields a very high heat for smelting. This myth sheds light also on Prometheus's creation of man from clay; in Hebrew legend Prometheus's part was played by the Archangel Michael, who worked under the eye of Jehovah."58 All these mythic sources ultimately feed into "Pygmalion," and so, we can note in passing, does that marvellous early line in which Beddoes fused combined potent life force with a mere diagram: The titles of two plays only have survived; and of one of the intended plays all that remains is one line, preserved in Kelsall's memory as a symbol of all the grand conceptions that then took shape, Like the red outline of beginning Adam.59

His redaction of the Pygmalion myth owes its uniqueness to the presence of a divine creativity, an element absent from its earlier versions. The statue externalizes Pygmalion's better self in a way that brings to mind that impenetrable dogma of "the Father[‘s] contemplating from all eternity as in a mirror His Divine Perfections and thereby begetting eternally the Eternal Son and the Holy Spirit proceeding out of Father and Son for all eternity."60 Galatea originates in a similar kind of self-reflection: —and for the rest The living form with which the stone be blest Was the loved image stepping from his breast. And therefore loves he it and therefore stays About the she-rock's feet, from hour to hour, Anchored to her by his own heart;

Leonardo's Trattato had recoiled fastidiously from the brute force of the sculptor—

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the sculptor in creating his work does so by the strength of his arm by which he consumes the marble, or other obdurate material in which his subject is enclosed: and this is done by most mechanical exercise, often accompanied by great sweat which mixes with the marble dust61

—but it's significant that sweat and "strength of arm" should both be conspicuously absent from Galatea’s creation. And if she resemble the autogenesis of the Son through the Father's contemplation of his own divinity, she also reminds us of Athene, who "sprang, fully armed, with a mighty shout" (Graves, 1:46) from the head of Zeus. Galatea, however, comes to birth in demure silence, "stepping" into existence instead of "springing." Just as the umbilical cord anchors new-born babies to their mothers, so Pygmalion, reversing that parental dynamic, finds himself "Anchored to her by his own heart." Anchorage evokes ideas of circumscription and ultimately of confinement, and he finds himself chained to a "she-rock's feet," a Sphinxian phrase that Donner stigmatizes as a "monster of bad taste" (Making of a Poet, p. 176). I disagree. Rock traditionally stands for stability, and in Mozart's Così fan tutte, its steadfastness offsets the intangible violence of wind and weather: "Come scoglio immoto resta / contra i venti, e la tempesta."62 That steadfastness, we should recall, has as its corollary an absence of feeling. Furthermore, geologists define rock by its formlessness, as "an aggregate . . . of minerals."63 The word thus projects the ragged outline of the paltum upon the finished image of Galatea in what amounts to a masterly double-exposure. Beddoes makes the anchor chain attaching Pygmalion a channel that siphons off his "balsamum" into his creation. The myth of Talos supplies a precedent of sorts, since that effigy had "a single vein which ran from his neck down to his ankles, where it was stoppered by a bronze pin" (Graves, 1:314-15). Now an anguished planctus supervenes upon the poem, its mental swerves and self-contradictions depicting a mind in extremis. Beddoes had a template of sorts in Dorigen’s lament, which also challenges providence and tries to reverse its ordinances— But, Lord, thise grisly feendly rokkes blake, That semen rather a foul confusion Of werk, than any fair creacion Of swich a parfit wys God and a stable, Why han ye wroght this werk unresonable?64

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—and he furthermore drew on Marlowe's hero in Dr Faustus 5.2.163-66, who pleads for a prolongation of life ("lente, lente currite, noctis equi") and who also veers from one position to another: Where is it now? 'tis gone: And see, where God stretcheth out his arm, And bends his ireful brows. Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall on me, And hide me from the heavy wrath of God. No, no! Then will I headlong run into the earth. Earth, gape! Oh no, it will not harbour me.65

Pygmalion begins by addressing Venus, but, when that meets with no response, falls back on a bet-hedging blanket invocation: 'Goddess that made me, save thy son, and save The man that made thee, goddess, from the grave. Thou knows’t it not; it is a fearful coop Dark, cold, and horrible—a blinded loop In Pluto’s madhouse’ green and wormy wall. O save me from’t; let me not die, like all. For I am but like one—not yet, not yet, At least not yet—and why? my eyes are wet With the thick dregs of immature despair, With bitter blood out of my empty heart,

Since in no Greek myth does Aphrodite figure as the creatrix of humankind, Beddoes seems to have invoked her simply for the sake of the chiasmus "Goddess . . . made me / man . . . made thee, goddess." This antimetabole seals Pygmalion into his dilemma, a version of the "fearful coop" in terms of which he imagines his death. Because he has amorously "bred" Galatea from within—an issue of being rather than of sculpture— he invokes Aphrodite, goddess of relationships, instead of Apollo, god of the arts. She has accordingly "made" Pygmalion by lifting him to a new plane of achievement—deific rather than artistic. "Made" here carries the same semantic charge that it does in "self-made man." Since the eternal feminine—"das Ewig-Weibliche"66—encompasses all its avatars, the image of Galatea can be said to be an image of Aphrodite by indirection, and Pygmalion to have made an effigy of the goddess herself. Like Faustus in articulo mortis, he at first begs for a longer life, expressing his horror at the claustrophobia of the grave. As formicaries reveal their tunnels in profile, so Beddoes's cross-section of the burial ground reveals a system of infernal cul-de-sacs. "Wormy" applies to the

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state of the corpses, which, themselves having turned into writhing masses, convert their graves into magnified worm holes. Their sliminess finds confirmation in the unpleasant greenness of the subterranean soil, which one would have expected rather to be dark and loamy. Beddoes compounds the horror by invoking the noisy disorder of a madhouse. Avernus was hardly silent—"Continuo auditae voces vagitus et ingens / infantumque animae flentes" [At once are heard voices and wailing sore— the souls of infants weeping]67—and neither was Dante's Inferno, with its raging winds and crackling fire. But how disquieting a hell conceived as perpetual Bedlam, the apocope of the genitive ("madhouse' green and wormy wall"), which Beddoes compounds with a clumsy double genitive ("Pluto's madhouse' green and wormy wall"), reproducing the slurred speech of idiocy. Nothing could be further from the restful, dreaming enclosure by which poets have more usually euphemized death: "Each in his narrow cell for ever laid, / The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep" (Gray, p. 120). Pygmalion pleads exemption from death by invoking the rage for order through which he has drawn level with Zeus: "let me not die, like all, / For I am but like one—not yet, not yet." Since he is speaking to a divine auditor, he breaks off an argument that, if he were to set it out premise by premise, would amount to hubris. But, unlike the Sybil, who asked for eternal life without a clause of everlasting youth, he changes tack, and asks for an end to it all, just as Elijah recoils from an exhausted and exhausting life-in-death: "It is enough, now, O Lord, take away my life; for I am not better than my fathers" (1 Kings 19.4). Compare Pygmalion's cry: "I could not be more lifeless being dead. / Then let me die" (p. 82). Another biblical allusion—the agony in the garden, where Jesus' "sweat was as it were great drops of blood" (Luke 22.44)—can be detected in the artist's eyes, "wet / With the thick dregs of immature despair, / With bitter blood out of [his] empty heart." Beddoes's disjunctive punctuation conveys the fragmented mental processes of a man undecided over life or death, uncertain whether to ask for exemption or for strength. Just as his mind rests on the cusp of sanity and delirium so his sense of his statue swings from a sense of its animacy to a conviction of its stoniness, the appositional accusatives mapping out the alternative takes: "Oh grant it my sweet rock—my only wife"; "Her heart? Ah touch it.—Fool. I love the stone." Beddoes has here remembered King Lear's lament over the corpse of Cordelia, which also uses stone to measure unresponsiveness—"Howl, howl, howl! O! you are men of stones" (5.3.256)—and also the father's resentment that his daughter should die while life persists in lesser creatures—"Why should a

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dog, a horse, a rat, have life, / And thou no breath at all" (5.3.305-06). Compare Beddoes: "Inspire her, gods—Oft have ye wasted life / On the deformed, the hideous and the vile." And just as Lear seeks life signs in the face of evident lifelessness—"Look on her, look, her lips, / Look there, look there" (5.3.509-10)—so too does Pygmalion ("Did you not see / How still she hears the music of my moan?"). Eventually, however, the brutal fact asserts itself: "Her heart? Ah, touch it.—Fool. I love a stone." As Browning after him, Beddoes has built stage directions into his verse, the prolonged caesura after "touch it" dramatizing the pain of truth as it undercuts the speaker's wishfulness. As the urgency of the planctus intensifies, Pygmalion changes his invocation, glancing first at Zeus, and then at Apollo, who, as the god of poetry and healing, can better understand his plight. Epizeuxis thrums upon the second person pronoun—"Aye—thou—thou knowest"—as he homes in on the chosen deity, while the assonantal shift from "thou" to "know’st" to "groan," spaced out by tentative pauses, turns the line itself into a stylized cry of pain. Beddoes expressly breaks with classical sources here, for it was Zeus who ordained the eventual fate of Niobe, having been "moved to pity" (Graves, 1:259) by her plight. Pygmalion, on the other hand, makes Apollo the petrifier, urging that Niobe's punishment be reversed in the animation of Galatea. The vindictive energy of "drovest" (as opposed to the neutrality of "became") creates a forced forward movement, which then reverses into the gentle, staged animation of the statue. As Galatea initially "stepped" out of the stone, so her maker begs that she might "tread" the path from insentience into humanizing compassion: "let her follow / That mother’s track of steps and eyelid rain / Treading them backwards into life again." Epanorthosis conveys his confused efforts at achieving mental order amid back-tracking redefinitions: Life said I? lives she not? is there not gone My life into her which I pasture on? Dead where she is not? Live, thou statue fair, Live, thou dear marble! or I shall go wild.

In cases of extreme anguish, sufferers often avert their faces from its source (as in that standard locution of "drawing a veil"). In Rousseau’s scène lyrique, Pygmalion had done this literally by placing Galatea behind a curtain, and Dr Coppelius, E. T. A. Hoffmann's maker of life-like effigies, also resorts to the same device—"I noticed that the curtain, which is generally drawn across a glass door, had a little chink open at the side."68 Beddoes follows these examples, for the veiling conduces to

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suspense and theatricality, and allows the transformation to proceed by subtly modified tableaux. But whereas in Rousseau, the curtain conceals the deficient work from the repentant vision of the sculptor, in Beddoes, Pygmalion veils his creature to spare himself the knowledge that she can't love him. A faint hint of the Arnobian version of the myth (that of Galatea’s having functioned as a "sex doll") seems to declare itself in the verb "cover," hinting at coitus as well as concealment ("I cover thee, my sweet"). Pygmalion weaves life and death through his imperatives, and his statuesque anadiplosis conveys the monomania of a man whose life depends on a dead thing: "when I return, oh live! / Oh live—or I live not." Beddoes now effects the animation of the statue by subtle gradations, invoking the capacity for thought (the final stage of the process) at that comparatively early stage when blood begins to colour the stone—"the cheek was growing human / With the flushed distance of a rising thought / That still crept nearer." "Still" blends the adverb of persistence with the adjective of immobility, each by itself measuring the artist’s obsessiveness and frustration. When finally he comes to acknowledge the hopelessness of his case, reason triumphs over fancy—"'Tis the last look and he is mad no more: / By rule and figure he could prove at large / She never can be born"—the participle punning on stoical submission ("borne") as well as birth. Pygmalion’s imminent death registers in the metonym of a foot in the act of embarkation, in which Beddoes uses the present continuous tense to heighten its momentariness—"and from the shore / His foot is stretching into Charon’s barge." This stylization then yields to the more graphic depiction of deaththroes in which Pygmalion now follows Niobe’s "track of steps" toward death by petrifaction: "Upon the pavement ghastly he is lying / Cold with the last and stoniest embrace." Anticipating Victor Hugo, who in the coda to Les Travailleurs de la mer records a "celestial light . . . discernible in those two faces formed by innocence; one virginal, the other sidereal,"69 Beddoes tracks his entry not into the "fearful coop" and "blinded loop" (his initial conceptions of death) but rather something akin to the "vacant interstellar spaces" (Eliot, p. 180) of "East Coker" ("His eyes have a wild starry grace / Of heaven, into whose depth of depths he’s dying"—p. 83). Like many other Greek heroes, he seems poised to become a constellation. However, I differ from Donner in my reading of the finale, for it seems clear that the sculptor comes back from the brink of the grave. Portents derived from the transformations of the eighteenth-century theatre—"Pale Spectres, gaping Tombs, and Purple Fires: / Now Lakes of liquid Gold, Elysian Scenes, / And Crystal Domes, and Angels in Machines"70—alert the reader to the divine reversal of his fate, the palace breaking up

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repeatedly in the manner of a babushka doll—"Roof after roof the palace rends asunder"—and disclosing, at its very heart, a redemptive pietà: He lies beside a fountain on the knee Of the sweet woman-statue, quietly Weeping the tears of his felicity.

The ambiguous pronoun of "his felicity" (the source of Donner's misprision) can be explained by the fact that Galatea’s life derives from her creator's, and her tears are as much his as hers, for he has vicariously bestowed upon her the ability to weep. By foregrounding "woman" before "statue," Beddoes asserts her new-found humanity, but reminds us of the artistic process from which the "miracle" has issued. Both figures are clearly happy, he at the granting of his wish, she at having the Niobe-like capacity to weep with him. And so it is that with "Pygmalion," the best (because the most disciplined and focussed) of Beddoes’s narrative poems, the Outidana collection, had it ever seen light of day, would have arrived at a worthy climax.

CHAPTER SEVEN “LETTERS IN VERSE”

The authors of eighteenth-century epistolary poems turned by and large to Horace for inspiration, since it was he who produced, in the words of The Spectator (No. 618), "Epistles in Verse, . . . Familiar, Critical, and Moral; to which may be added Letters of Mirth and Humour."1 According to the same source, the tone of these productions derived from "a good Fund of strong Masculine sense"; "a thorough knowledge of Mankind"; "an insight into the Business and prevailing Humours of the Age"; "a Mind well seasoned with the finest precepts of Morality" and a mastery of "refined raillery, and a lively turn of wit, with an easy and concise manner of expression" (p. 208). We will, however, search in vain for these qualities, most especially for ease and concision, in Beddoes’s epistolary poems, notwithstanding the Horatian motive behind their composition. Take for example, the opening of his epistle "To B. W. Procter, Esq.," subtitled "From Oxford, May, 1825." William Warburton, in his posthumous edition of Pope, recast the epistolary poems as dialogues—a procedure made "easy and plausible" by "the dramatic and colloquial nature of Pope's verse."2 But if one were to attempt something similar in respect of Beddoes's verse letter, the dialogue would issue in the Jacobean pastiche of Death’s Jest-Book, in which the characters speak a largely undifferentiated lingua franca. Procter never figures as an adversarius against whose values the speaker hammers out his own creed (as in the Popian "moral essays"). He remains instead an uncharacterized cipher into whose ear is poured a stream of improvised poetry—portentous, sometimes absurd, sometimes wonderfully lyrical. Take the plangent opening lines: In every tower that Oxford has is swung, Quick, loud, or solemn, the monotonous tongue Which speaks Time's language, the universal one After the countenance of moon or sun, Translating their still motions to the earth.3

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Language of this order—rich and highly wrought—doesn't properly fit the tradition of invitational poems to which the letter belongs (I shall give such poems the nonce name of kletika, from the Greek verb țĮȜȑȫ, "to summon for dinner"). The line stretches back at least as far as Catullus' "Cenabis bene, mi Fabulle apud me" [You shall have a good dinner at my house, Fabullus"]4 and forward to Tennyson's verse epistle "To the Rev. F. D. Maurice" ("Come, when no graver cares employ, / Godfather, come and see your boy").5 Their chosen lexis leans toward the social and sociable, the simplicity of Catullus and the ease of Tennyson both indexing intimacy and relaxation. Beddoes, by contrast, formulates his invitation with all the afflatus of the poetic drama even though in other respects his epistle conforms to type, setting up a spatial divide between inviter and invitee, and offering the former's superior circumstances as an enticement. His opposition of Oxford to the metropolis ("shake London from thy skirts away"—p. 85) parallels the way in which Tennyson would later set the Isle of Wight against the "noise and smoke of town" (p. 1023). However, the register represented by "the monotonous tongue / Which speaks Time's language," recalling the "iron tongue of midnight" in A Midsummer Night's Dream 5.1.349, violates the conversational decorum of the verse episle, that "easy and concise manner of expression" desiderated by The Spectator. It also belies Donner's claim that the "ease with which it was written gives it an unpretentious charm,"6 unless by "ease" he mean "rapidity of execution" rather than sprezzatura. The lines in question project nothing if not a sense of strenuousness. What ordinary domestic letter would move from bells to cosmic bodies, setting the persistent clamour of the one against the silent grandeur of the other, and translating (in the sense of "transferring" but also of "explicating") extra-planetary silence into the sonic registration of time? Later in the century, Longfellow would call music "the universal language of mankind,"7 an aperçu that Beddoes not only anticipates but renders more subtle by building into that language the mortality it vectors, a fallacy of equivocation that equates the tongue (or clapper) of the bell with "tongue" in the sense of "language." His rhyme drives the elision home: "the monotonous tongue"/"the universal one." The kinaesthetic tilt of vowel in the shift from "is" to "has"—"In every tower that Oxford has is swung"—reproduces the passage of the clapper within the bell in the movement of the tongue from the lower frontal vowel /ae/ to the high frontal /I/. Furthermore, a discordia concors centres on the word "monotonous," for if we compare the opening with a similar moment in Little Dorrit—"Maddening church bells of all degrees of dissonance, sharp and flat, cracked and clear, fast and slow, made the brick-and-mortar

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echoes hideous"8—we will see that Beddoes has reduced a sonic jumble to a meaningful thorough-bass to forge a parable of time's passing. Equally paradoxical is "still motions," though one can partly efface the contradiction by reading the adjective of quietude and immobility as an enallagic adverb of persistence, which reinstates the frantic movement of bells in belfries. This impressive proem (impressive, but generically inappropriate) remains still-born, however, for Beddoes fails to develop it. Indeed one has the impression that it was probably recycled ad hoc from one of the his unfinished dramas, as witness the careless shift (seemingly unremarked by the author, who, after all, pretends to be improvising his lines note for note against the striking of the hour) from bells recording time to bells making festive music: I cannot read; the reeling belfry's mirth Troubles my senses; therefore, Greek, shut up Your dazzling pages; covered be the cup Which Homer has beneath his mantle old, Steamy with boiling life: your petals fold You fat square blossoms of the yet young tree Of Britain-grafted, flourishing Germany: Hush! Latin, to your grave: and with the chime My pen shall turn the minutes into rhyme And like the dial blacken them. . . . (p. 84)

Only celebratory bells would issue in "reeling . . . mirth," which, if we bear in mind the emphatic inclusiveness of the opening line ("In every tower that Oxford has is swung"), summons up the idea of multiple carillons. An echo of the "Ode to a Nightingale" in "Troubles my senses" (compare "a drowsy numbness pains / My sense"9) suggests a discord between that a festivity in the world outside and the poet's mental exhaustion and satiety. This has resulted from prolonged study of the official syllabus—Greek and Latin—and also his study of German on the side, and so he launches into an exorcism modelled on those in "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso." The vocative "Greek" seems at first to direct itself at a person rather than at a language, one of three implicitly opposed to time’s "universal one," and a source of disquiet as much as of joy. Because the "dazzling" page of Homer suggests a radiance almost intolerable to mortals, and his "steamy" vessel something at once dangerous and redemptive (a communion chalice cum poison cup), Beddoes's yearning for repose declares itself in acts of closure and covering. He so yearns for an organic, natural environment that he strains

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after a conceit and turns German books into "fat square blossoms." The cumbersome substance of "fat" and rebarbative angularity of "square" takes us back, perhaps, to Wordsworth's "Tables Turned"— Up! Up! my Friend, and quit your books; Or surely you'll grow double: Up! Up! my Friend, and clear your looks; Why all this toil and trouble?10

—which adduces, as remedy, "One impulse from a vernal wood." This Beddoes mockingly displaces with rectangular, leathern growths in an artificial environment. Germany at this time was an area defined by language rather than by nationhood, though the reference to the "young tree" suggests that the poet was already taking an interest in the continental reaction against the Congress of Vienna. He might even, by his curious injunction that Latin return to its grave, be suggesting the imminent eclipse of its southern culture by a thriving, energetic northern one that competes in value with classical studies, but this would only work if we construe "Latin" as a cultural rather than a linguistic personification. I suspect, however, that the last is what Beddoes has in mind, since he wants to consign a "dead" language to its vault. Having packed up his books, he pretends to start the poem which has, of course, long been underway, correlating the construction of its rhymes with the sounding of the hour, and activating the replicative sense of "chime" beneath the campanular one, and thus superposing the scriptive sense of language upon the aural communication of the hour. The numbers on the dial correspond to the inscriptions on his blank page, rendering thought visible as the clock face embodies the otherwise imperceptible passage of hours and minutes. By thus embodying the ineffable IJo ʌĮȞIJİȜȦı ȠȞ in mere İȚįȠȜĮ, the clock corrupts its being, for "blacken" conveys the disfigurement implicit in the very fact of their realization: "My pen shall turn the minutes into rhyme / And like the dial blacken them." Beddoes's attention now shifts at last to Procter, whom he tries to imagine in a variety of different domestic circumstances. The transition, effected without the necessary noun or pronoun, remains somewhat bewildering: There sits, Or stands, or lounges, or perhaps on bits Of this rag's daughter, paper, exorcises With strange black marks and inky wild devices The witch of words, the echo of great verse

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About the chasms of the universe, Ringing and bounding immortality.—

Sometimes verse epistles try to reconstruct the addressees' lives as way of conveying the writers' interest and empathy. One thinks, for example, of Pope's "Epistle to Miss Blount, on her leaving the Town, after the Coronation": To pass her time 'twixt reading and Bohea, To muse, to spill her solitary Tea, Or o'er cold coffee trifle with a spoon, Count the slow clock, and dine exact at noon.11

That, certainly, is one inspiration behind Beddoes's poem, but others also come to mind. The relentless polysyndeton of "Or stands, or lounges, or perhaps on bits" recalls Elijah's mockery of Baal in 1 Kings 18.27—"either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth"—and captures the satiric mock-comprehensiveness of the enterprise; while the moment inParadise Lost—"And swims or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies"12—that registers Satan's cosmic journey, might lie behind Beddoes's "chasms of the universe," since these recall "the nethermost Abyss" (p. 254). Procter's reputation in the twenty-first century rests on his slight lyric verse, but we must remember that he entertained grander ambitions, and had written a tragedy called Mirandola. It is these that Beddoes must have in mind when he describes him in the act of composition, though it's also clear that, while nominally sketching his friend's creative processes, he's actually writing about himself. We see this in the continuity between his decision to "blacken" transient time and his image of Procter as an oracle who spreads prophecies over "bits of this rag's daughter, paper" as the sibyl her predictions over leaves. Not only does he duplicate Beddoes's blackened sheets with his own "strange black marks and inky wild devices" but the deictic in "this rag's daughter" could refer to paper in general (manufactured as it is from rags, and therefore "rags' daughter") as well as the sheet on his own desk in Oxford. This provides another ficelle to link him to his friend in London. Once again, the effect is unepistolary, and brings to mind the exalted periphrastic diction that Beddoes deployed in his tragedies. This is certainly not the linguistic province in which Procter had staked his claim. "The Leveller," for example, attempts a solemn acquiescence to mortality along the lines of the Cymbeline dirge or that in Shirley's Contention of Ajax and Ulysses, but whereas his predecessors had dealt with sonorous metonyms—

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—his own casual meiosis reduces death to an everyday "fellow," and so strips it of terrifying otherness: Yet there is a fellow, whom nobody knows, Who maketh all free On land and sea, And forces the rich like the poor to flee!14

Such a poem can't be termed "the echo of great verse," by which Beddoes must mean something like "persistent resonance" rather than "imitation." He has undoubtedly recreated Procter in his own Dionysiac image, rendering his creativity in impassioned, irrational, incantatory terms, a fact compounded by the omission of the implied pronoun in "There sits." For in the absence of an official subject (Procter) the "witch of words" (actually the direct object) momentarily presents itself as the inverted subject, and "exorcises" becomes intransitive in function. The aetiology of paper from rags evokes the presence of a tattered female ("this rag's daughter"), which in turn connects with "witch of words" who is also, in a sense, the "which of words" since both poets are engaged in endless acts of lexical selection. Given the fact that Satan has flown into sight on the back of the earlier polysyndeton, and the fact that the witch seems momentarily to subjugate the poet's will to her own, we have entered a demonic universe far removed from the hearths of Oxford and London. Beddoes's imaginative trajectory flings us out of the quotidian world and into a Miltonic vista in which the very boundaries of the universe become apparent. The loose syntax creates doubt as to whether the "echo of great verse" is "ringing" (in the sense of "resounding") and "bounding" (in the sense of "leaping in exultation"), or if the chasms stand in apposition to a "ringing and bounding immortality," in which case the ringing and bounding demarcate the space instead of evoking movement and sound. "Ringing" also takes us back to the cacophonous carillon at the start of the poem, and forward to the madness induced by Melpomene’s draught, for in former times tinnitus was associated with insanity. She, the muse of tragedy, likewise figures as a "witch of words," nominally maternal, but actually evoking the perverted motherhood of Lady Macbeth:

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Give him thy bosom, dark Melpomene, And let him of thy goblet and thy eye Exhaust the swimming deep insanity. He hath the soul, oh let it then be fed, Sea after sea, with that which is not read, Nor wrung by reasoning from a resolute head, But comes like lightning on a hill-top steeple; Heaven's spillings on the lofty laurelled people.

One can't remotely imagine such an apostrophe in one of Horace's or Pope's epistles. Beddoes has, for the time being, cast that Augustan template aside. Re-imaging Melpomene's bosom as a drinking vessel by way of salva pudicitia, he projects the relation of muse and poet in sexual terms, their congress registered above all in the zeugma of goblet and eye, for in exhausting their "swimming deep insanity," Procter is made to enter the erotic realm of the "Ode to Melancholy": "Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave, / And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes."15 The muse figures as a "dark" presence not only because she inspires tragedies but also because she permanently maddens her protégés with "furor poeticus," a sinister bequest that even Wordsworth, in all his saneness and sobriety, was forced to acknowledge: "We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness."16 "Swimming" advances not only its archaic sense of "overflowing" (of which the OED has only one sample, dating from 1595) but also the more usual idea of mental dizziness. How odd it is that a letter should wish "deep insanity" upon its recipient, especially when the imaginative framework blurs intoxication with toxicity and when the muse, feeding the poet salty "sea after sea," must certainly induce a maddening thirst instead of quenching it. Just as Keats in his "Ode to a Nightingale" regrets the fact that "the dull brain perplexes and retards" (p. 208) his imaginative enterprise, so Beddoes conceives a tragedy untrammelled by mental control. Addison's Atticus and Johnson's Irene would have struck him as defective specimens of the form, too decorous and self-censored—an impoverished drizzle, in other words: "Nor wrung by reasoning from a resolute head." In his vision, such works represent mere droplets in relation to Melpomene’s immeasurable seas, seas that he means Procter effortlessly and passively to drain. "Sleep and Poetry" claims that poetry comes "like fearful claps of thunder, / Or the low rumblings earth's regions under" (Keats, p. 42), and turns it into a force of nature. This Beddoes develops further in the image of the lightning that, like thunder, has its origin in the edicts of Jove. The

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fact that it makes electrifying contact with an elevated point in the landscape—the "hilltop steeple"—harks back to Keats's peak-located theophany: "Should I rather kneel / Upon some mountain-top until I feel / A glowing splendour round about me hung" (p. 43). Just as Shelley had claimed that poets are the "unacknowledged legislators of the world,"17 so Beddoes presents them as a race apart, a "lofty laurelled people" correlated with the double exaltation of a spire on an eminence, and crowned with wreaths that identify them as the elect of Apollo. He then leaves behind the subfusc imagery of Melpomene and her formless seas, and launches Procter on a creative journey by means of a brief propemptikon: Verse to thee, light to thee, wings upraise thee long In the unvacillating soar of song, Thou star-seed of a man!

This recalls the mediaeval bestiary lore that had the eagle renovate its sight in the sun, and suggests that the poet soars in search of a similarly rebirthed vision. By the same token, the bird's mastery of thermal currents (by allegorical equation, Procter’s control of language) guarantees the "unvacillating" trajectory of its course. The ad hoc vocative "star-seed" further evokes an elective affinity with the sun by way of Plato, who in Timaeus posits "souls equal in number to the stars,"18 and also by way of Lucretius, who claims that "coelesti sumus omnes semine oriendi [we are all sprung from celestial seed]."19"Star-seed" also hints at Procter's prolificity by echoing Gen. 22.17: "I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven." But just as that upward flight gains momentum, Beddoes sounds an Icaran note: . . . But do not dare To tempt thy Apollonian god too far, Clogging and smoking thy young snake, Renown, In the strait stony shadows of the town, Lest he grow weak and pine and never be What he was born, twin to Eternity.

This passage resonates with Matt. 4.7 ("Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God"), not least because Apollo, the deity of the sun toward which Procter is soaring, is also the god of poetry, as jealous as Yahweh and prone to punish those who challenge his supremacy (Marsyas comes to mind). While he might assist Procter in his first efforts, he will exact vengeance for his hubris if he rise to greater things. The cumbersome and tortuous allegory of the "young snake, Renown" alludes to the god's legend—

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"Python fled to the Oracle of Mother Earth at Delphi . . . but Apollo dared follow him into the shrine, and there despatched him beside the sacred chasm"20—a chasm possibly restated as "the strait stony shadows of the town." Whatever that might mean in allegorical terms, the idea of depleted creativity emerges from the murk. As so often in Beddoes, the effort at figuration fails for want of systematic convertibility, the snake (Procter's reputation) now tangled up with his own identity, and trying to twin itself with eternity—something that Procter himself should properly doing. Beddoes, moreover, addresses his injunction to his friend, whereas, given the fate of Python, Apollo himself should be clogging and smoking the snake. London itself gets sucked into the confusion insofar as its smog and stone (contrasting with the invitingly airy fields of Oxford) threaten to poison the poet's development. At this point, Beddoes redirects his kletikon to the business in hand, viz, inviting his friend to join him in those very fields. He sets aside the portentous (not to say strained) discourse on time and immortality and ideal poetry, and modulates to a more relaxed manner, his cletic anaphora ("So come"; "so come") seeming both lyrical and importunate at the same time: So come, shake London from thy skirts away: So come, forget not it is England’s May. For Oxford, ho! by moonlight or by sun; Our horses are not hours but rather run Foot by foot faster than the second-sand, While the old sunteam like a plough doth stand Stuck in thick heaven.

The "May" rhyme also lightens the mood, given its association with pastoral idylls (Breton's "Phyllida and Corydon" comes to mind—"In the merry month of May, / In a morn by break of day"21), and with reverdiessuch as the one inserted into "The Legend of the Good Women": But yt be seldom on the holyday, Save, certeynly, whan that the month of May Is comen, and that I here the foules synge, And that the floures gynnen for to sprynge, Farewel my bok, and my devocioun!22

In fact, by bidding farewell to formal studies, Chaucer anticipates Beddoes's own strategy, the shift from an anti-academic palinode into the university's pastoral surrounds. Just as Keats had used the "viewless wings of Poesy" (p. 208) to escape the world in the "Ode to a Nightingale," so

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Beddoes resorts to Pegasus-like horses, far outstripping the speed of the London-Oxford coach. As a result, Apollo turns from potent, jealous deity into an impotent ploughman, his agrarian drays unable to shift a chariot bogged down in a viscous sky. Remembering how, in Ovid's Amores 1.13, the prolonged insemination of Alcmena involved a reshaping of calendar time—"ipse deus genitor, ne te tam saepe videret, / commisit noctes in sua vota duas" [the very father of the gods, that he need not see thee so oft, made two nights into one to favour his desires],23—Beddoes's imagination exercises the same godly prerogative ("These are the honey-minutes of the year / Which make man god"—p. 85), and matches Joshua's arrestation of the sun, something that Marvell was unable to do: "Thus, though we cannot make our Sun / Stand still, yet we will make him run."24 The pun on "hours"/"ours" conveys the godliness of a gesture made both on behalf of himself and of Procter, for the powers that enable it are, like Helena’s found jewel in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 4.1.191, are their own and not their own. Contrasting the harsh meridian exposure of the "sunteam" with the freshness of an Oxford morning, Beddoes slips in an aubade at this point. He evokes the scene with the same immediacy achieved in the "Ode to a Nightingale" ("Already with thee!"—p. 208) and with the predictive confidence of Donne's "Blossom" ("and thou shalt see / Me fresher and more fat"25): ... Here thou at morn shalt see Spring’s dryad-wakening whisper call the tree And move it to green answers; and beneath, Each side the river which the fishes breathe, Daisies and grass whose tops were never stirred, Or dews made tremulous, but by foot of bird. And you shall mark in spring’s heaven-tapestried room Yesterday’s knoppe burst by its wild perfume, Like woman’s childhood, to this morning’s bloom;

The OED provides only one sample, dating from 1679, of the phrase "at morn[ing]," which startles ears more accustomed to "at dawn." Since "morning" implies a risen sun, and "dawn" the prelude to that rising, the displacement of one by the other anticipates the dawn that "comes up like thunder"26 in Kipling’s "Mandalay"—another instance of the way in which time is foreshortened in the poem. At the same time, the synaesthetic sight of "Spring’s dryad-wakening whisper" actualizes the effect of a communication too subtle for us to hear. Beddoes recalls the triumphalism of the "Ode to the Spring"—

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Disclose the long-expecting flowers And wake the purple year! The Attic warbler pours her throat, Responsive to the cuckoo’s note, The untaught harmony of spring: While whispering pleasure as they fly, Cool zephyrs through the clear blue sky Their gathered fragrance fling.27

—but restates all Gray's elements (a breeze, an awakening, responsive antiphons) in an unexpected pianissimo. Because he conflates the trees with their mythic genii, "move" retains both its kinetic and its emotive senses, and so creates a tender courtship between wind and foliage. The inaudible whisper finds an echo in the inaudible breathing of the fish that we don’t see in the river, but which enter our consciousness in the same way that the otherwise invisible roots enter it in "I Stood Tip-Toe": "And let the long grass grow round the roots to keep them / Moist, cool and green" (Keats, p. 3). Even while he brings Procter into the virgin landscape, Beddoes preserves its virginity ("Daisies and grass whose tops were never stirred") by having him hover over it—a consciousness à la Berkeley that confers ontology without participation. The delicate balance of the dew on the grass blades registers in a factive verb that finds itself arrested by an undynamic adjectival complement ("made tremulous"). Beddoes has drawn inspiration from Leigh Hunt's delight in bowers— With bowering leaves o'erhead, to which the eye Looked up half sweetly and half awfully,— Places of nestling green, for poets made,28

—and constructed something similar after his own design. He hangs its walls not with the traditional "boscages" ("Rustic landscape tapestry design, developed from medieval mille-fleurs pattern, used primarily for bedroom hangings"29)—for foliage is already to hand—but rather decorates it with glimpses of sky since the wood has not yet fully leaved. And in its midst he sets a personified blossom, figured as a pubescent girl, her breasts hinted by the antique "knoppe" (in preference to "bud")— hinted but effaced when the emblematic breast ruptures by virtue of the heavy perfume it encloses. Beddoes reinforces that bursting with metrical gaucherie, locating an antibacchius in the penultimate foot, and creating three strong stresses that strain against their confinement. Moreover, when the bud splits open, it reveals not only an actual "morning's bloom" but

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also a figuratively fresh complexion, the same "youthful hew" that Marvell compares to "morning dew" in "To his Coy Mistress" (p. 28). Whereas the "Ode to a Nightingale" offers a darkling catalogue of beauties ("I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, / Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs"—Keats, p. 208), light floods Beddoes's landscape, the temporal immediacy of the deictic in "this morning's bloom" borne out by the attentive close-ups that bring the flowers to Procter's notice: And here a primrose pale beneath a tree, And here a cowslip longing for its bee, And violets and lilies every one Grazing in the great pasture of the sun Beam after beam, visibly, as the grass Is swallowed by the lazy cows that pass. Come look, come walk, . . .

The poet assigns a possessive pronoun to the bee that visits the cowslip to imply the consummation of a long-established courtship, whereas the unrelated singleness of the primrose ("beneath a tree" rather than "its tree") recalls its counterparts in The Winter's Tale 4.4.122-24: "pale primroses, / That die unmarried, ere they can behold / Bright Phoebus in his strength." Beddoes creates a double climax by passing from a shady spot where flowers are scarce to a sunny pasture where they abound, and where they not only absorb the light of "Bright Phoebus in his strength" but actually digest it. He has almost stumbled on the idea of photosynthesis avant la lettre. The lines in question probably derive from the Davideis ("They sing loud Anthems of his endless Praise / And with fix'd Eyes drink in Immortal Rays"30), but he has demythologized Cowley's angels into flowers and his deity into a sun that offers sustenance ("pasture" in the abstract sense of nutrition rather than concrete fodder). A characterful oddness attaches to "graze" since the verb more properly applies to the passing cows than to the flowers they are about to crop. One must assume that a meadow breeze, riffling the blooms beneath it, suggested a peristaltic motion to Beddoes, son of a doctor. All this is restful and pastoral and undemanding, but, remembering the crucial transition in "Sleep and Poetry"— And can I ever bid these joys farewell? Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life, Where I may find the agonies, the strife Of human hearts: for lo! I see afar, O'ersailing the blue cragginess a car And steeds with streamy manes— . . . (Keats, p. 45)

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—Beddoes changes gear, and shifts from the beautiful to the strenuous sublime: . . . —and there shall suddenly Seize you a rapture and a phantasy, High over mountain sweeping, fast and high Through all the intricacies of the sky, As fast and far as ship-wrecked hoard of gold Dives ocean, cutting every billow's fold. These are the honey-minutes of the year Which make man god, and make a god—Shakespeare. Come gather them with me. . . .

He recapitulates the eagle-like soaring earlier wished upon Procter, but has switched deities, the near-hendiadys of "Seize you a rapture" (if we take "rapture" in its root sense of "raptio" or seizure) turning Procter into an eagle's prey, and, by implication, a Ganymede on the brink of immortality. Since Beddoes has already referred to his German texts, we would be justified in drawing a line of connection between this passage and Goethe's "Ganymed": Hinauf! Hinauf strebts. Es schweben die Wolken Abwärts, die Wolken Neigen sich der sehnenden Liebe. Mir! Mir! In euerm Schosse Aufwärts an deinen Busen, Alliebender Vater! [Up, a striving upward. The clouds are floating Down, the clouds Bow to love that is yearning. Take me, take me, Clouds in your lap, Upward, Embraced embracing! Upwards to your breast, All-loving father!]31

Because Oxonian mountains are in short supply, we know that an imaginative landscape has supervened upon the one so attentively documented up till now. "All the intricacies of the sky" might refer to elaborate cloud effects, but could just as well describe tiered structure of

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the Judaic universe. Beddoes seems to be leading Procter to the seventh of those tiers, a place of transcendent ecstasy, and the metaphor charting his progress—treasure so heavy as to overcome the resistance of water—has an enantiomorphic relation to the activity it illustrates. A single contradictory instant connects the upward rise of the poet in pursuit of his verbal treasure and the downward passage of the gold, its force registered through a rare transitive "dive," and compounded by the metaphoric compression of waves to paper sliced without effort: "Dives ocean, cutting every billow’s fold." Beddoes concludes this passage with another parabola, for antimetabole sets Procter/Ganymede on Olympus on the one hand, and, on the other, presents Shakespeare as an Olympian come to earth. Elsewhere I've drawn attention to the "sentence fermata"— an emphatic caesura that "puts on hold the flow the syntax" and which, when relaxed again, "produces a sense of release"32—often, as here, a source of comedy. The portentous, caesura-backed pause after"god" mocks the countermotion by which the deity, far from debasing himself (as in the Christian dogma ofkenosis), achieves perfection by becoming the greatest writer the world has known. The formal, which is to say the invitational, part of Beddoes's kletikon reaches its conclusion in the final summons "Come gather them with me," "them" being the "honeyminutes" of the year, poignantly brief and therefore a cause for carpe florem urgency. The rest of poem takes form as a mock commination, and invokes the various woes that will be visited upon Procter if he declines the invitation: . . . If not, then go, And with thee all the ghosts of Jonson’s toe, The fighting Tartars and the Carthaginians: And may your lady-muse’s stiff-winged pinions Be naked and impossible to fly, Like a fat goose pen-plucked for poetry. A curse upon thy cream to make it sour: A curse upon thy tea-pot every hour; Spirits of ice possess it! and thy tea, Changed at its contact, hay and straw leaves be!

Whereas Oxford would have raised Procter to Shakespearian heights, his London-bound poetry will align him with the lesser Jonson, the latter's "toe" a synecdoche for the cothurnus or tragic boot. (Beddoes seems to have nodded at this point, since Tartars and Carthaginians more properly refer to Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Dido, Queen of Carthage.) And whereas at Oxford Procter would have been soaring like a magisterial

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eagle, in London he will be saddled with clip-winged goose, its penlessness a perfect metaphor for writer's block. His prim "lady-muse" accordingly becomes a goose-girl rather than a Leda seeking congress with divine swans, the apparent tautology not so much a record of her gender as of the narrow gentility of her tea-table inspiration. For instead of gothic "urne fatali"—Homer’s cup "Steamy with boiling life" and Melpomene’s goblet of "swimming deep insanity"—Procter has taken up his station beside a tea urn. One wonders whether W. S. Gilbert remembered this when, inThe Sorcerer, he transposed the Wolf's Glen scene ofDer Freischütz into an English village, and engineered a spell in a teapot rather than a cauldron: Ye fiends of night, your filthy blight In noisome plenty yield! MR. WELLS (pouring the phial into the tea-pot—flash). Number One! CHORUS. It is done!33

The spirit lamp that warmed teapots in Regency drawing rooms has clearly inspired the apparitional "Spirits of ice" that discharge a function diametrically opposed to that of their liquid homonym. Cold tea would be malediction enough for an Englishman, but Beddoes is not content to stop there, and wreaks havoc on the décor, perhaps to prove his observant nature and retentive memory, or to crack a private joke that can’t be recovered at this time. We can only speculate about the identity of the "grave compass-handed quiet sire" in the "mathematic picture." Perhaps Procter had hung a portrait of Euclid, abstracted from Raphael’s School of Athens, above his fireplace. Eighteenth-century engravings of the entire fresco certainly existed,34 so individual passages might have been derived from the whole. The Procter entry in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography makes no mention of any geometical proficiency at Harrow, or of a father possessed of the same—if, that is, we refer "sire" to Procter père rather than to Euclid, the notional "sire" of this form of mathematics. Besides, tactless though Beddoes was in many respects—and in the next verse epistle he directly accuses Procter of trivializing his talent—it seems somewhat unlikely that he would have violated storge and vandalized the father's image. The compound adjective "compass-handed" curiously elides anatomy and implement (as later in the film Edward Scissorhands), and so dehumanizes and mechanizes the genius of the Procter hearth ("compass-holding" would have kept the metre and still differentiated flesh from metal). By keeping company with this cold, mechanical figure instead joining Beddoes in Oxford, Procter will himself have brought its

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acidic desecration upon his own head. The imprecation ends with an aposiopesis, suggesting that the joke has overstayed its welcome, and that it's time to rein in the maledictory overkill: No more.—Be these the visions of your sorrow When you have read this doggrel through tomorrow, And then refuse to let our Oxford borrow You of the smoky-faced Augustan town, And unpersuaded drop the paper down.

This breaking-off contains a mock-heroic echo of Gray's "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College"—"No more; where ignorance is bliss / 'Tis folly to be wise"35—but it functions primarily to bring the improvisation to a close, the meiosis of "doggrel" inviting Procter to demur at this assessment of a brilliant jeu d'esprit. "Augustan town" picks up on London's Latin name ("Augusta"), but since the OED provides an 1819 citing of "Augustan" as an epithet for eighteenth-century poetry, Beddoes is also passing a poetic value judgement, claiming that life in the city will issue in an urban sort of poem belonging to a discredited era, whereas rural Oxford would have been inspired a sublime Romantic poetry that rises above urns and teapots. His untroubled sense that his poem might well end up in the bin strikes a note of light-hearted casualness quite different from the plangent rhetoric of the start. "Another Letter to the Same From Göttingen; March, 1826" is less improvisatory that its predecessor. It takes form as an ars poetica, and attempts to justify to his friend the enterprise that would eventually become known as Death's Jest-Book. Beddoes, now studying medicine in Germany, had been gestating this work in the midst of his scientific pursuits, which, since they centred on the dissecting room, would have inured him to the terrors of death. Indeed we glimpse this activity over his shoulder in the proem. Once again Beddoes misses the tone more usually associated with a familiar epistle, for he simply can't renounce a magisterial periphrasis, and begins the same arresting plangency as that of the Oxford invitation: Today a truant from the odd old bones And winds of flesh, which, as tamed rocks and stones Piled cavernously make his body's dwelling, Have housed man's soul: there, where time's billows swelling Make a deep ghostly and invisible sea Of melted worlds antediluvially Upon the sand of ever-crumbling hours, God-founded, stands the castle, all its towers

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With veiny tendrils ivied: . . . (p. 86)

Tapinosis, an essential plank for the construction of Death’s Jest-Book, is no less crucial to this expository letter. Instead of the gloating, Gothic presentment of corruption that we find in "Rodolph the Wild" (The Improvisatore)— He saw his welcomer, the ribs that kept No prisoned heart within their crumbled bars, And to his eyeless sockets fat worms crept, Whose eyes peeped out like lurid meteor stars. (p. 37)

—we learn that familiarity has bred contempt. The "odd" in "odd old bones" suggests a dilapidated skeleton in a Göttingen lecture room, one from which crucial duple elements are missing, while "old" establishes a tone of reductive intimacy (while also indicating their yellowed, studentfingered age). In The Poems Posthumous and Collected of Thomas Lovell Beddoes (London: William Pickering, 1851), edited by Thomas Forbes Kelsall, "winds" has been emended to "rinds,"36 an alteration prompted, it would seem by the editor’s puzzlement at the presence of zephyrs in a dissecting room. If, however, one pronounces the word with the /aI/ diphthong instead of the /I/ vowel, it will become clear that, by virtue of enallage, "winds" are the hanks of fabric (in other words, tendons and sinews) that bind together the bones of the body. Disassembled though these might be, they are the building materials of the body, which 1 Cor. 6.19 images as the site of deity, and, by extension, of the soul ("know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost?"). That same body also finds shelter in actual structures evolved from prehistoric dolmens and burial chambers, the "bones," as it were, of primitive architecture. "Piled cavernously evokes the same sense of poised precariousness that we find in "Pygmalion," where a city figures as "an arched tide / Of unrolled rocks" (p. 78). The result is a palimpsest that superimposes contemporary building methods on the odd old stones, (as opposed to "odd old bones") of dolmen architecture. Beddoes also hints at the prehistory of humankind, which included a troglodytic phase ("Piled cavernously"), and the prehistory of its physical organism. A proto-Darwinian colour arises from the hint that life originated in the sea, albeit a "ghostly" one—not only in the spectral sense of that adjective but also with regard to the vitality that derives from the Old English gƗst. But that hint is largely eclipsed by the allegorical function of waters fed by "time's billows," and (if we recall that gƗst could also mean "breath") partly based on the creation myth of Gen. 1.2, in

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which "the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." The Cuivierian extinctions within its depths hold a clue to that interface between physical and metaphysical being that Beddoes hoped to locate through the study of medicine, and he enhances our sense of mystery and derangement by dislocating the adverb from the participial adjective which, as a result, trails irresolutely and unbelongingly behind the noun: "Of melted worlds antediluvially." The melting in question could refer to volcanic magma, but it also applies to the action of waves upon the shore, a shore upon which the poet's allegory erects the body in defiance of the parable in Matt. 7.26 about "a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand." He thus blends the destructive assault of time's billows with the passage of sand through an hour-glass, slipping away of its own volition as well as being eroded. The castle reference harks back to the home of Alma in Book II of The Faerie Queene, a home that, to honour the corporeal substrate of his conceit, Spenser renders in organic terms: Not built of bricke, ne yet of stone and lime, But of thing like to that AEgyptian slime, Whereof King Nine whilome built Babell towre; But O great pitty, that no lenger time So goodly workemanship should not endure: Soone it must turne to earth; . . .37

Beddoes stops short of investing his castle with this strained Vitruvian geometry, but his upright towers nonetheless hint at the posture of Homo erectus. Moreover, instead of using slime to register a fleshy texture, he covers them with the creepers that function as Vesalian diagrams of the blood vessels. And whereas Spenser offered a plodding conversion of body function and structural detail (even the anus becoming "Port Esquiline, whereby / It was voided quite, and thrown out priuily"—p. 115), Beddoes keeps his allegory within the bounds of metaphor. The tendrils remain tendrils, their veininess only a figurative proximation: "With veiny tendrils ivied." In other words, the allegory, like all Beddovian allegory, defies systematic conversion. What, for example, do those towers signify in se? And does it finally matter if they can't be attached to any tangible signifié? Spenser had taken pains to construct a humanoid building out of a circle, triangle and rectangle, but the data remain inert. How much more satisfying an allegory that "hangs" and teases us out of thought, its open-ended, inscrutable figuration looking ahead to such poems as Victor Hugo's "Trompette du jugement," which renders silence audible by withholding constructive equivalents for each of its sibylline details:

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Ce lourd silence était pour l'affreux mort farouche L'impossibilité de faire faire un pli Au suaire cousu sur son front par l'oubli. [for the wild and awful dead this heavy silence was the impossibility of making a fold in the shroud sewn over his brow by forgetfulness.]38

Taking leave of his official studies to pursue the (by now) recreational composition of poetry, Beddoes figures the break as a journey, one no doubt undertaken across that "deep ghostly and invisible sea," to an island. Like those in The Odyssey and The Tempest, this will offer a magical (and possibly dangerous) alternative to life in the dissecting room, a life that has demystified death and suffering into merely carnal issues: . . . this bright day I leave its chambers and with oars away Seek some enchanted island where to play. And what do you, that in the enchantment dwell And should be raving ever, a wild swell Of passionate life rolling about the world, Now sun-sucked to the clouds, dashed on the curled Leaf-hidden daisies; an incarnate storm Letting the sun through on the meadows yellow; Or anything except that earthy fellow That wise dog's brother, man? . . .

The enchanted isle of the imagination counterpoints the right little, tight little island on which Procter plies his trade of commercial versifying. By advancing the "play" of his composition against the implicit "labour" of anatomy, Beddoes pretends that his poetic efforts are recreational and dilettantish, the rhetorical strategy (diminutio) found in the Prologue to "The Franklin's Tale": "Colours ne knowe I none, withouten drede, / But swiche colours as growen in the mede."39 And just as the Franklin's modesty "can only be mock-modesty, a concealed form of ostentation,"40 so Beddoes sets the plangency of his own (recreational) verse against the attenuated lyrical pabulum to which Procter, a fulltime man of letters, and a former purveyor of tragedy, has sunk. As in the advice-to-the painter topos, he sketches out a poetic vocation for the addressee that is actually his own in disguise, viz, writing verse of an ideal rather than a pragmatic nature, and giving wide berth to "That wise dog's brother, man." We can infer from this that he spurns the urban, reductive cynicism of Augustan satire, etymologically connected with the Greek țȣȞȚțȠȢ, the latter derived

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in turn from țȣȫȞ, a dog. By contrast, his Dionysiac conception of the poet has its roots in Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind"— . . . Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like withered leaves to quicken to new birth!41

—and also in the same poet's "Cloud": From my wings are shaken the dews that waken The sweet buds every one, When rocked to rest on their mother's breast, As she dances about the sun. I wield the flail of the lashing hail, And whiten the green plains under, And then again I dissolve it in rain, And laugh as I pass in thunder. (p. 368)

The ideal poet here figures as a force of nature, a force with planetary range and significance, not a purveyor of vers de société. Just as Beddoes had wished the "swimming deep insanity" of Melpomene upon Procter in the earlier epistle, so here he makes that insanity de rigeur and perpetual, the subjunctive of propriety rendering it a duty rather than a choice. At the same time he invests him with the properties, both peaceful and violent, exhibited by Shelley's cloud and wind. In A Midsummer Night's Dream 5.1.12-16, Theseus had mapped the graph of the poetic imagination as a parabola described between the supernatural and the real— The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The form of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.

—an idea that Beddoes develops as a movement not so much of the poet's eye as of his actual person (we remember the physical rapture, or snatching-up, promised to Procter if he were to trade London for Oxford). Thus conceived, the bard both cleanses and nurtures, the first activity caught by dashing rain on the daisies (in the manner of the "lashing hail" in "The Cloud"), the second by the way those "leaf-covered" flowers (one remembers the "violets cover'd up in leaves" in the "Ode to a

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Nightingale"42), whose petals curl for lack of moisture, find shelter from an onslaught that will at the same time revive them. Not only does this "incarnate storm" sustain the natural environment but it also functions as its "spotlight," drawing humankind's attention to phenomena to which it has become indifferent or even blind (Wordsworth's plaint as well: "Little we see in Nature that is ours"43). So Beddoes reveals the transfigured meadow in a shaft of sunlight made possible (once again in the manner of Shelley) by the poet-cloud: "Letting the sun through on the meadows yellow." This prolonged and impassioned credo has all but eclipsed the question that prompted it, viz, "And what do you?"—a question to which Beddoes now replies on his friend's behalf, impulsively and tactlessly using a rhetoric of depreciation: ... Oh shame to tell! Make tea in Circe's cup, boil the cool well, The well Pierian, which no bird dare sip But nightingales. There let kettles dip Who write their simpering sonnets to its song, And walk on Sundays in Parnassus' park: Take thy example from the sunny lark, Throw off the mantle which conceals the soul, The many-citied world, and seek thy goal Straight as the starbeam falls. Creep not nor climb As they who place their topmost of sublime On some peak of this planet pitifully; Dart eaglewise with open wings and fly, Until you meet the gods. . . .

This use of tapinosis springs from the fact that Beddoes's conception of literature—demonic and prophetic—can't be squared with polite society, and the literary small-talk that sustains it. He scales down everything to convey his contempt, the liquid that Procter brews falling short of the sublime cup of Isa. 52.17—"O Jerusalem, which hast drunk at the hand of the Lord the cup of his fury; thou hast drunken the dregs of the cup of trembling and wrung them out"—which image Beddoes has blent in turn into the Circe myth. He does so in defiance of Homer, whose enchantress feeds her victims ordinary food, and only then casts a spell ("And when they had emptied the bowls in which she had served them, she struck them with a wand, drove them off, and penned them in pigsties"44). But those bowls were still bowls, generous and heroic containers rather than the mincing teacups of the Regency drawing room that Beddoes superposes upon them. In "Peter Bell the Third," Shelley had reduced the infernal

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sublime with a similar stroke—"Hell is a city much like London— / A populous and a smoky city" (p. 379)—the casual "much like" scaling down Milton's Pandemonium to a contemporary townscape. In the same way Beddoes scales down a primitive, "manly" ıȞijȠȢ into something urban and feminine. Corrupt journalistic taste, couched in the precautionary language of the housewife, dictates that the waters of Hippocrene first be purified by boiling. Because the insipid brew it yields can't match the inebriation of sublime verse, Beddoes has made pejorative use of Cowper's domesticity to image a cautious, stay-at-home poet. The cosiness of The Task— Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast, Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round, And, while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn Throws up a steamy column, and the cups, That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each, So let us welcome peaceful ev'ning in.45

—would have struck Beddoes as claustrophobic and limiting, the same qualities he attributes to the keepsake and the annual. Whereas it would take an act of unpremeditated faith for wild nightingales to sip the cool (which is to say, unboiled) waters of Pierian fountain, their tame urban counterparts lack that crucial abandon, and a fortiori does their landscape, a Parnassus that has been emparked into a kind of Vauxhall Gardens. Instead of the steep mountain passes of sublimity, we confront regulated walkways and the accommodating gradients of theGradus ad Parnassum, which is to say "dictionaries of Latin prosody (to help in making Latin verses), of Greek, etc."46 Instead of generating their songs from within as a nightingale would, poetasters recite only the sound of a kettle that boils and "pasteurizes" the source of inspiration. The result is a monotonous, cautionary whistle. When urging Procter to imitate the lark, Beddoes clearly had Shelley's bird in mind— Higher still and higher From the earth thou springest Like a cloud of fire; The blue deep thou wingest, And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest. (p. 640)

—a bird scarcely distinguishable from a bestiary eagle in its effortless pursuit of light. By "sunny" Beddoes signifies "solar" rather than "cheerful" in the "Pollyanna" sense. Trailing its Wordsworthian "clouds of

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glory," the worthy soul seeks out "God, who is our home" (p. 460)—or, rather, the less specified gods of Beddoes's imagination. Just as the previous letter poem had set the descent of jettisoned treasure against the upward aspiration of the enraptured poet, so the same contrary motion recurs here. The effortless and rectilinear passage of light and the Platonic conception of the star in which it originates suggest the sacred nature of the quest, which finds reinforcement in the iconography of Renaissance Annunciations. Mariotto Albertinelli's,47 for example, connects Mary and her inseminating dove with a linear beam. Since the first verse epistle had identified Procter as "star-seed," this grandiose searching comes as no surprise, but the nature of its goal remains altogether vague. That in itself poses a problem, for artes poeticae traditionally offer practical advice about the craft. While it certainly makes some sense to counsel a friend against trivializing and attenuating his talent, it makes less to offer salvation outside the compass of human experience. Mimesis, that essential premise of western art, requires imitable subject matter rather than "vacant interstellar spaces."48 By coupling the reptilian "creep" with the heroic, aspirational "climb," Beddoes seems to downgrade a merely terrestrial sublime— . . . Creep not nor climb As they who place their topmost of sublime On some peak of this planet pitifully;

—and reduces the planet's most exalted mountaintops to "pitifully" puny excrescences. As a result, the adverb dangles in the same awkward way as "antediluvially." Although Beddoes's gods have no truck with the mountain-top theophanies of Judeao-Christian belief, he doesn't stop to explain them, and that compromises the letter's effectiveness as a practical guide to poetry. The fact that the magisterial eagle (surrogate for the "sunny lark") can "dart" shows that he hasn't properly concentrated his thought. Ambition and prudence have often been at odds, as witness this anecdote of window-pane graffiti from the time of Elizabeth I: "FAIN WOULD I CLIMB YET FEAR I TO FALL" A gracious courtier, a finer writer and a bold seaman, Raleigh came from Ireland determined to win the queen's favour. He wrote the above words on a window pane with a diamond given him by the queen. "IF THY HEART FAILS THEE, CLIMB NOT AT ALL" Elizabeth, who had already been favourably impressed by Raleigh, added the words above to those of the young courtier.49

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It is this sort of demur that Beddoes sets at nothing when he recklessly equates judgement with foolishness, flying in the face of Augustan restraint as he does so: . . . Thus counsel I The men who can, but tremble to be great; Cursed be the fool who taught to hesitate And to regret: time lost most bitterly.

Pope had stressed that "Wit and Judgment often are at strife, / Tho' meant each other's Aid, like Man and Wife,"50 and furthermore pronounced that Pegasus, "like a gen'rous Horse, / Shows most true Mettle when you check his Course " (p. 146). And whereas his "Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread" (p. 163), Beddoes's invert that stance. They also invert the advice ofArs Poetica: Sumite materiam vestris, qui scribitis, aequam viribus et versate diu, quid ferre recusent, quid valeant umeri. cui lecta potent erit res, nec facundia desert hunc nec lucidus ordo. [Take a subject, ye writers, equal to your strength; and ponder long what your shoulders refuse, and what they are able to bear. Whoever shall choose a theme within his range, neither speech will fail him, nor clearness of order.]51

That the Romantic poet despised such self-reinings can be deduced from the elliptical "time lost most bitterly," the dissociated adverb once again depending like a regret at the end of the line. The bitterness centres on remorse over squandered opportunities rather than on loss itself, but that's all one when, as here, language itself becomes twisted and congested with contempt through its rejection of "lucidus ordo." Ending his projection of the ideal poet in a magisterial way—"And thus I write" vaguely recalls Pilate's "What I have written, I have written" (John 19.22)—Beddoes redefines his daring as a transgression of social norms. Because he's created a bardic, prophetic persona for Procter—who had nothing of the kind—he has implicitly mounted an attack upon his friend as a poetaster and "sell-out": And thus I write and I dare write to thee, Fearing that still, as you were wont to do, You feed and fear some asinine Review. Let Jaggernaut roll on, and we, whose sires

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Blooded his wheels and prayed around his fires, Laugh at the leaden ass in the god's skin. (pp. 86-87)

This provides a savage new take on vers de societé, usually conceived as lightweight, untaxing and elegant, and presents it instead as a brutal form of idolatry. Taking "asinine" back to its etymon, Beddoes forges a parable that recalls Perrault's Peau-d'âne, a character who disguises her nobility with an ass's hide: "Meanwhile the Princess journeyed on, begging those she met to give her employment. But she looked so filthy and abject under the donkey-skin none would accept her."52 But when Beddoes turns this inside out and offers us a donkey clothed in the integument of a god, he might also be recalling the story of Midas who attended the famous musical contest between Apollo and Marsyas, umpired by the River-god Tmolus. Tmolus awarded the prize to Apollo who, when Midas dissented from the verdict, punished him with a pair of ass's ears.53

He takes care to soften the criticism by means of the homiletic plural, for there can be little doubt that Procter would have read these lines with indignation: "and we, whose sires." By thus setting them apart from the "profanum vulgus [the uninitiate crowd],"54 he tries to assuage the wound that he has just inflicted before once again tactlessly scorning all traffic with the parlour. Nor would the schoolmasterly "Example follows precept" have gone down very well either: Example follows precept: I have been Giving some negro minutes of the night Freed from the slavery of my ruling spright Anatomy the grim, to a new story In whose satiric pathos we will glory. In it Despair has married wildest Mirth And to their wedding-banquet all the earth Is bade to bring its enmities and loves Triumphs and horrors: you shall see the doves Billing with quiet joy and all the while Their nest's the scull of some old king of Nile:

Those "negro minutes of the night," while they serve primarily to establish the lateness of the hour, also point the novelty of Beddoes's planned enterprise, amounting, perhaps, to a racial paraphrase of Pliny: "Unde etiam vulgare Graeciae dictum semper aliquid novi Africam

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adferre [This indeed is the origin of the common saying of Greece that Africa is always producing some novelty.]"55 He drives this "African" exoticism home by referring to Egypt, and also by invoking his "slavery" to medical studies, for the slaves in British colonies had yet to be emancipated. Beddoes displaces the traditional muse with "Anatomy the grim," whose revelations, prompting contemptus mortis, induce his satiric vision of things. By calling her a "spright," he aligns her with Celtic rather than classical mythology, and also allows the resonance with "sprightly" to create an oxymoronic dissonance against "grim," recapitulated in "satiric pathos." In the manner of a great allegorical canvas—Botticelli's La Primavera, say or Bronzino's Allegory of Love—he presents his project as the "wedding-banquet" of "Despair" and "Mirth," the antithetic distance between the partners half-bridged by the fact that the "wildest mirth" displays the sort of hysteria that might very well tread on the heels of despair. Since most epithalamia engage in pageantry, he populates his tableau with "all the earth"—a Shakespearian gesture that recalls "All the world's a stage" (As You Like It 2.7.139)—and foregrounds the abstract allegory ("enmities and loves / Triumphs and horrors"), its vehicle an emblematic composition of marital doves in a pharaoh's skull. That locus of tyrannical power-lust, now occupied by birds of peace and fidelity, recalls a comparable displacement in Peele: "His helmet now shall make a hive for bees."56 Both ideas have their provenance in the messianic beating of swords "into plowshares" (Isa. 2.4). Just as "Ozymandias" exults in the eclipse of brute power, so here the pharaoh's aspiration to godhead is reduced to a dismissive, generalizing phrase: "some old king of Nile." The purified nakedness of the skull and its reinvention as a cosy receptacle distance the horror of death, proving that Beddoes has advanced beyond the plashy putrefactions in "Rodolph the Wild." Where before he had tried to frighten, now he attempts to reassure and familiarize. This vignette of doves in a skull encapsulates the whole enterprise of Death's Jest-Book, the underlying assumption of which owes as much to the graveyard scene from Hamlet: Ham. Why, e'en so, and now my Lady Worm's, chopless and knocked about the mazard with a sexton's spade. Here's fine revolution and we had the trick to see't. Did these bones cost no more the breeding but to play at loggets with 'em? Mine ache to think on't. Grave. (sings) A pickaxe and a spade, a spade, For and a shrouding-sheet, O a pit of clay for to be made For such a guest is meet.

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[Throws up another skull.] (Hamlet 5.1.87-95)

Common to both is an irreverent take on death that springs from familiarity. Hamlet's post mortem feast of misrule harnesses an exalted social title ("Lady") with a "worm," archetypal image of insignificance ("I am a worm "—Psalm 22.6), and it turns bones into counters for a game of skill ("play at loggets"). Just such an inversion can be observed in the doves that nest in a kingly skull. The address to Yorick—"Where are your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar" (5.1.183-85) might also have inspired Beddoes's reconception of death as a jester: But he who fills the cups and makes the jest Pipes to the dancers, is the fool o' the feast. Who's he? I've dug him up and decked him trim And made a mock, a fool, a slave of him Who was the planet's tyrant: dotard Death: Man's hate and dread: . . .

Holbein's Totentanz sometimes presents the skeleton as a quietly menacing ironist—a presence felt, say, in a convocation of cardinals—and it as frequently mocks the victims that try to escape to escape. For the mockery of death itself, Beddoes could have referenced the irrisio in 1 Cor. 15:55—"O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory"—and also the Donne sonnet that develops out of it: "Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, / And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell."57 But whereas apostle and priest had both adduced theological reasons for their conquest of death, Beddoes, working from the realities of the dissecting table, can try only to alter perceptions and attitudes. His relentless acervatio, heaping up synonym upon synonym ("a mock, a fool, a slave of him") generates rhetorical noise, but fails to issue in victory. Having done nothing to curtail death's power, he can't properly lay claim to a preterite of triumph, but does so nonetheless: "Who was the planet's tyrant" (my emphasis). He tries to differentiate his stance from predecessors' by way of smoke screen: . . . not with a stoical breath To meet him like Augustus standing up, Nor with grave saws to season the cold cup Like the philosopher, nor yet to hail His coming with a verse or jesting tale As Adrian did and More: . . .

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Beddoes has muddled up his emperors here, for, according to Suetonius, it was Vespasian who carried on with his Imperial duties as usual, and even received deputations at his bedside; until he almost fainted after a sudden violent bout of diarrhoea, struggled to rise, muttering that an Emperor ought to die at least on his feet, and collapsed in the arms of the attendants who went to his rescue.58

"Stoical breath" has as cogent an application to the unnamed philosopher, since the emblematic chalice, while obviously derived from Mark 14.36 ("take this cup away from me"), also applies to Socrates. The latter's end (preceded by a period on "death row") made provision for the utterance of "wise saws": So Sokrates had to spend a month in prison before his sentence could be carried out, and he passed that time in discussions with his friend, some of whom came from other parts of Hellas to bid him farewell. It would have been quite easy for him to escape at any time . . . but Sokrates was a firm supporter of the law, and he would not stoop to the inconsistency of making an exception in his own case.59

"Cold cup," therefore, while it suggests the low emotional temperature of Stoic ataraxia, also functions proleptically to suggest the chill of death. Such repose certainly differs from the maniacal satire of Beddoes's proposal, which differs in turn from the light patronage of Hadrian's prompemptikon— animula vagula blandula, hospes, comesque corporis, quae nunc abibis in loca, pallidula, rigida, nudula, nec ut soles dabis iocos? [Dear fleeting, sweeting, little soul, My body’s comrade and its guest, What region now must be thy goal, Poor little wan, numb, naked soul], Unable, as of old, to jest?]60

Thomas More's macabre joke before his execution compounds both "cold cup" and "jesting tale": "The scaffold was rickety, and More said to the lieutenant, 'I pray thee see me safe up, and for my coming down let me

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shift for myself.' So Roper tells us."61 Beddoes can, in the last resort, talk only in terms of tone and not of substance: . . . but of his night, His moony ghostliness and silent might To rob him and uncypress him i' the light, To unmask all his secrets; make him play Momus o'er wine by torchlight is the way To conquer him and kill; and from the day Spurned, hissed and hooted send him back again An unmask'd braggart to his bankrupt den.

Here death undergoes exposure as a mountebank, his theatrical spectacles and sleights of hand turned wrong side forward so as to as "unmask" them. Beddoes thus implies that gothicism has invested death with properties of the sublime—darkness, indistinctnes, vastness—and that, like Hyperion in Gray's "Progress of Poesy"— Night and all her sickly dews, Her spectres wan and birds of boding cry, He gives to range the dreary sky: Till down the eastern cliffs afar Hyperion's march they spy and glittering shafts of war (pp. 167-68)

—he will disperse them by subjecting them to the light of reason. However, as Donner points out, . . . Browning instinctively put his finger on this sore point when remarking on the difference between the finished play and the intentions of the author as expressed in the verse letter to Procter: 'He was to despoil Death of his horrors . . . he does exactly the reverse.' A long familiarity with the subject may to some extent have numbed Beddoes' sense with regard to the horrible; and he may have been able to laugh where others could not, as indeed his letter to Procter seems to indicate.62

Beddoes should have taken us into the dissecting room in broad daylight, and displayed the old bones in their prosaic reality, since that is where "Contempt grows quick from familiarity," "quick" here paradoxically resuming its Old English signification "alive." But he opts instead for a theatrical chiaroscuro, the unwitting victim of the gothic that he tries to deconstruct. By lighting his feast with torches that serve only to emphasise the darkness they fitfully banish, his theatrical effects swamp the prosaism of his "uncypressing" project. This last verb presumably refers to the chaplet that death wears upon his head in Beddoes's nonce iconography.

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Or possibly he means to drag the offender out of a cypress grove and into the open. Which ever way we cut it, we end up with a gothic tableau and not an ordinary medical venue. The cause receives further damage by evoking the taunts and insults of the Passion narrative (also associated with torchlit darkness), which mythifies the subject even as he tries to demythologize it. Momus was the Roman god of ridicule, "driven out of heaven for his criticism of the gods,"63 and now, in a different avatar, and subject to another kind of expulsion, the scorner becomes the scorned. Beddoes reverses Gay's spirited epitaph—"Life is a jest; and all things show it, / I thought so once; but now I know it"64—and makes death "more 'a jest' than Life." Characterized as a miles gloriosus, all sound and fury that signifies nothing, the "unmask'd braggart" harks back to "why swell'st thou then?" (p. 313) in Donne's "Death be not proud," and, by way of typographic parable, receives a lower-case D in opposition to life's triumphant capital. The prospectus of Death's Jest-Book ends with a dash that brings Procter back into the picture. Having insulted him as a purveyor of keepsake pabulum, Beddoes revisits that charge more cautiously. His back-pedalling might well be laced with irony, however, since he alludes to a student drinking song that he had probably encountered in Göttingen: Wer nicht liebt Wein, Weib und Gesang, der bleibt ein Narr sein Leben lang,65 [Who loves not woman, wine and song Will stay a fool his whole life long,]

The wine of that famous triad (later popularized by a Strauss waltz) strikes a dissonant note against the earlier attack on tea-party aesthetics: Your Muse is younger in her soul than mine: O feed her still on woman's smiles and wine And give the world a tender song once more, For all the good can love and can adore What's human, fair and gentle. Few, I know, Can bear to sit at my board when I show The wretchedness and folly of man's all And laugh myself right heartily. Your call Is higher and more human: I will do Unsociably my part and still be true To my own soul. . . . (pp. 87-88)

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Although Beddoes has tried generously to condone Procter's ability to settle for less, he can't avoid a measure of back-handedness. A muse "younger in her soul" might be innocent of cynicism, but will also share the limitations of the "young person" in Our Mutual Friend: It was an inconvenient and exacting institution, as requiring everything in the universe to be filed down and fitted to it. The question about everything was, would it bring a blush into the cheek of the young person? And the inconvenience of the young person was that, according to Mr Podsnap, she seemed always liable to burst into blushes when there was no need at all.66

Beddoes pretends to defer to Procter's elegance and polish, believing all along, with Dryden, that "Satyr needs not those, and Wit will shine / Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line."67 A satirist worth his salt, moreover, one that, like Jaques in As You Like It 2.1.58-59 "most invectively . . . pierceth through / The body of country, city, court," can function only in a state of disaffection, taking his meals alone and in contempt of "fat and greasy citizens." Beddoes consoles himself by paraphrasing Hamlet 1.3.78—"to thine own self be true—an injunction that Harold Jenkins has rescued from a taint of self-serving: "the tradition of the maxim puts its meaning (Be constant) beyond doubt."68 When therefore, with a feigning modesty and deference, Beddoes tells Procter that he (Beddoes) "will do / Unsociably [his] part and still be true / To [his] own soul," he does nothing to temper the earlier criticism of his friend and everything to endorse his own position. Donner remarks of "Wednesday Evening" that the "date of this invitation is not even approximately known, but the punning vein seems to suggest one of Beddoes' later visits to Cheney Longville, e.g. 1842 or 1846."69 I'm not convinced. Beddoes "unsociably did his part" on these occasions, retiring into his bedroom in a haze of tobacco smoke and alcohol. And puns, furthermore, hardly constitute a badge of maturity. I would therefore be much more inclined to date the poem to the Oxford years before the poet's misogyny had set fast, a time when he would have had fewer qualms about dashing off the sort of graceful vers de société that he lambastes in the second verse letter to Procter. "Wednesday Evening" is also a cletic poem, but, unlike the first of the verse epistles, an actual rather than a notional one. One could easily imagine its having been scribbled on a carte-de-visite: Honoured Miss H. On my visage You might see

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286 Smiles of pleasure Without measure, Fol de ree. Since I'm writing And inviting You to T. (p.88)

The charm of such trifles lies in the improvisatory air of the versification, Beddoes's effort recalling (but hardly matching) in the airy impromptus that Gray tossed off without any effort. On leaving Raby Castle, for example, he observed, "Here lives Harry Vane, / Very good claret and fine champagne" (p. 279), and, having heard that an irritating ex-Master of Peterhouse had offered a man a goose, exclaimed, "Here lies Edmund Keene Lord Bishop of Chester, / He eat a fat goose and could not digest her" (p. 279). Beddoes book-ends the first and last lines with the initials of recipient and writer to facilitate his pun on the letter of the alphabet and the beverage he plans to share with the woman. The second stanza, equally slight, prefaces what would appear to be the cook's surname with a solemn Latin preposition of origin, and then generates a spirited off-hand rhyme: "Extra Hyson, / Teacake, a nice one." The joke of the codetta lies in his having invoked the muse for the composition of mere doggerel. Her neoclassic lyre, rhyming with "squire," triggers incongruous associations with those rubicund philistines we meet in Fielding and other eighteenthcentury novels: But here the muse Lays down her lyre— Pray don't refuse, And bring the Squire.

CHAPTER EIGHT POEMS CHIEFLY FROM DEATH'S JEST-BOOK (COMPOSED 1825-1829)

As Donner remarks, "the composition of Death's Jest-Book occupied Beddoes during the course of his stay atGöttingen," and the poems written during this period "were generally included in the play or in some manner connected with it".1 Since the purpose of this monograph is to focus on the poetry qua poetry and not on the merits (and defects) of Beddoes's dramatic structures or on his blank verse viewed sub specie theatri, I shall make no effort in this chapter and the next to contextualize the lyrics in hand. After all, since Elizabethan times at least, such poems have discharged a function rather more interlusive than thematic, the looseness of their anchorage often allowing them to break free and enter anthologies as self-sufficient units. The concert repertoire likewise contains many overtures from otherwise obsolete and unstageable operas, overtures that afford pleasure in their own right, and which require no dramatic framework to explain their intrinsically coherent structures. So let us start without ado at "Isbrand's Song," a grotesque fantasia in a Pythagorean key. As John Burnet points out, there can be no doubt that Pythagoras taught the doctrine of Rebirth or transmigration which he may have learned from the contemporary Orphics. . . . Empedokles seems to be referring to him when he speaks (fr. 129) of a man who could remember what happened ten or twenty generations before.2

Rejecting the term "metempsychosis," which "would mean that different souls entered into the same body," he goes on to suggest that we use instead the older "ʌĮȜȚȖȖİȞİıȚĮ, being 'born again'" (p. 43, note). In Beddoes's poem, an unhoused soul, in the throes of that "paliggenesia," runs through a menu of possible accommodations: Squats on a toad-stool under a tree A bodiless childfull of life in the gloom,

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Crying with frog voice, 'What shall I be?' Poor unborn ghost, for my mother killed me Scarcely alive in her wicked womb. (p. 89)

There had certainly been dystopic lyrics in the lead-up to "Isbrand's Song." Swift's "Description of the Morning" and "A Description of a City Shower," for example, wantonly put the form at the service of squalor, even using conventional poetic lexis to sharpen the contrast: "Now hardly here and there a hackney-coach / Appearing, showed the ruddy morn's approach."3 However, a lyric that refers to hackney-coaches has rather less shock-value than one that invokes an aborted foetus, "Isbrand's Song" belonging to a continuum that will eventually climax in such bitter-sweet utterances as Dorothy Parker's on suicide: Guns aren't lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live.4

The foetus that declaims the poem has barely gained shape, its deformity registering in the angular, unlyrical hyperbaton of the opening, which places a non-factive verb before its subject (a procedure better restricted to the transitive kind). "Squat," a verb ungainly and amphibious in itself, collaborates with the "frog voice" to suggest that it has reached the "tadpole" stage of that discredited formula toward which Beddoes might have been feeling his way, viz, the claim that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. But, having given palpable hints of a frog Gestalt, he revokes them for a knotty and open-ended concept—"bodiless childfull of life"— measuring presence ("childfull") by an absent vector ("bodiless"), and then creating further discord between the temperate landscape associated with toadstools and the desertscape of Egypt. Beddoes places us on the banks of the Nile through the adverb "yonder," which swerves away from "asunder" even as it feints a rhyme: "shall I creep to the egg / That's cracking asunder yonder by the Nile." Since the complexity of the first stanza—long-carried rhymes that almost lose their mutual affinity and virtuosic mono-rhyming sextuplet (or six-membered couplet-coda)—virtually defies reduplication, the very form of the lyric proves to be dystrophic, and projects the perverse deformities of its matter. Beddoes also creates the expectation of a lyric refrain—often prefaced an imperative "sing" (as in "Sumer is icumen in"—"Sing! cuccu, nu. Sing! cuccu"5)—and in the "Willow Song"—"Sing all a green willow" (Othello 4.3.40-41)—and then loads it with unlyrical bizarreries:

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Sing, "Catch a mummy by the leg And crunch him with an upper jaw, Wagging tail and clenching claw; Take a bill-full from my craw, Neighbour raven, caw, O caw, Grunt, my crocky, pretty maw! And give a paw." (p. 89)

A mummy's leg, casually disposed on the banks of the Nile, is mercifully immune to pain, however, and the phonaesthetic crackle of "crunch" and "clench" and "craw" expends itself harmlessly on insentient dust. At the same time, the diction turns the event into a sort of nursery game, the diminutizing endearment ("my crocky") as odd as Lewis Carroll's reapplication of "little" from bee to reptile: "How doth the little crocodile / Improve his shining tail."6 And while the Spur-Winged Plover of Egypt does indeed pluck food morsels and parasites from between the teeth of crocodiles, Beddoes garbles and fantasticates this attested fact when the reptile regurgitates its "food" (as birds do for their young) for the sake of a "neighbour raven." He likewise converts the crocodile's deadly caudal side-swipe into an innocuous doggy "wag," commanding it to "give a paw" as if to his pet terrier back in England. The verbal mechanisms of this stanza (and of the poem as a whole) instantiate the whole enterprise, viz, the "quickening" of contempt for death by means of "familiarity" ( p. 87). The crocodile, traditionally terrifying, has been refigured as an obliging pet. But for all the repeated strangenesses, Beddoes still remembers enough of his anatomy lessons to supply an accurate toe count. The pet Gestalt persists in the next stanza in which the foetus contemplates reincarnation as a pig. This it classifies with a childish ineptitude ("Thou'rt a dear dog"), and then chooses a hedgehog, no more a hog than a pig is a dog. Perhaps because of its nocturnal habits, Shakespeare had identified it with witchcraft in Macbeth 4.1.2 ("Thrice, and once the hedge-pig whin'd"), but Beddoes avoids that gothic touch, establishing instead a family resemblance between the thorned branches of a hedgerow and the spiny creature it shelters. Continuing the spirit of a nursery game, the hedgehog behaves like self-contorting child: "Sing, 'Twixt your ancles visage wedge / And roll up like an apple.'" That apple reference—thanks to the age-old misprision of the Genesis fruit—cues an address to Satan in his serpent avatar. Beddoes couches it in parodic vers de société language—"Serpent Lucifer, how do you do?"—and emphasizes the "handy" way in which snakes have dispensed with hands and other anatomical appendages. The foetus is so intrigued by the

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possibility of losing these that it’s prepared to geminate and enter "one or two." By invoking the "planet of wool and of leather," Beddoes provides two metonyms for human dress (dress that the limbless serpent is able to forego), but the words also turn the earth into a football, harking back to the artisanal cosomogony in "Alfarabi" ("To work they went, magician, hands, and Co., / With tongs, and trowels , needles, scissors, paste, / Solder and glue, to make another world" (p. 9) and forward to the "Resurrection Song" (p. 90) that succeeds it in the Donner edition. The latter, skirting the vague analogues adduced by Paul ("And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain: But God giveth it a body as it has pleased him, and to every seed his own body"—1 Cor. 15. 37-38), takes the rehabilitation of the corrupted flesh into a workshop, rethreading nerves like so much yarn, dusting down the heart, and giving the eyes a mechanical polish to restore their lustre. Beddoes also gives us a prescient glimpse of the plastic surgeon's trade: "And pull up his nostrils! his nose was snub." But back to "Isbrand's Song." The foetus, obsessed with perversity, and having delighted in the hedgehog's self-denaturement into a ball, likewise asks the snake to form a top: "Tail-a-top, and make your cap / Any bee and daisy." Thus disposed, it all but inoculates the sinister advice of Lady Macbeth—"look like th'innocent flower, / But be the serpent under't" (Macbeth 1.5.65-66). Similar iconoclasm occurs into the final strophe, which degrades the nightingale's song to the cacophony of a teetotalling puritan ("who sits up all midnight without any ale, / Making a noise with his nose"). That deliberate misnaming of parts caricatures the bird in semihuman terms, the phonetic slippage from "noise" to "nose" enacting the very nasality being invoked. And having desecrated a time-honoured emblem of beautiful song, the abortion converts a misshapen spine (traditional emblem of deformity—Vanity Fair proclaiming that a "woman with fair opportunities and without an absolute hump, may marry WHOM SHE LIKES"7) into an object of beauty, and hymning in succession the camel's back, the duck's gauche deportment and then its actual nasality. As with the nightingale's nose, Beddoes creates a hybrid of the kind that Horace censured: "Humano capiti cervicem pictor equinam iungere si velit . . . spectatum admissi risum teneatis, amici?" [If a painter chose to join a human head to the neck of a horse . . . could you, my friends, if favoured with a private view, refrain from laughing?].8 However, the foetus, even with an embarras de choix before it, opts for something still more perverse, a chimera of its own devising. It parodies "the procedure of

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Zeuxis when he constructed his Venus out of five beautiful maidens of Croton,"9 but whereas Zeuxis' piecemeal assemblage centred on an ideal of beauty, this particular confection goes in pursuit of oddity. Not content with the fusing horse and man, it cobbles up a six-legged teratoid that marries vertebrate and invertebrate biomorphs: "I'll be a new bird, with the head of an ass, / Two pigs' feet, two men's feet and two of a hen." Since the offspring of even closely kinned animals such as horses and donkeys can't reproduce, the buck of reincarnation must stop here, the foregone conclusion of the foetus's extinction registering in the name it chooses for itself—"The new Dodo is finished"—where "finished" can signify either "completion" or "eclipse" or both. The cletic note sounded by "come to my nest" has a hollow ring, for this creature of biological orts and scraps can no more expect to mate than the phoenix could (the latter a rejected alternative for "Dodo"). "Isbrand's Revenge" forges a pastiche ballad from Book 1 of Herodotus, who invokes the Thyestes myth to explain why Harpagus betrayed Astyages, the last of the Median kings. Having ordered the former to effect the death by exposure of the baby Cyrus, and having been disobeyed, the king served up Harpagus' own son at a banquet. The poem keeps close to its Greek source, though with some colourful divergences. For example, it reworks the deadpan Herodotan narrative—"Then those whose business it was brought him in the covered basket the head and hands and feet of his son, and they stood before Harpagus and bade him uncover and take of them what he would"10—into a fruit dish that activates a pun on "fruits of the loin": 'Wilt have some fruit? Wilt have some wine? Here's what is soft to chew; I plucked it from a tree divine, More precious never grew.[']

This resonates with the voice of the tempter in Genesis, an association reinforced by the "precious" nature of the offering, which recalls the "blooming Ambrosial Fruit / Of vegetable gold"11 in Paradise Lost. Beddoes then reworks the ritual anaphora of "Sir Patrick Spens" ("The first line that Sir Patrick read"; "The neist line that Sir Patrick read"12) into a stage-by-stage narrative: Harpagus took the basket up, Harpagus brushed the leaves away; But first he filled a brimming cup, For his heart was light and gay.

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Enclosing a terrible event in an orderly syntactic box, Beddoes makes it the more terrible by that external order. Astyages' voluble and incoherent gloating poses difficulties of interpretation. How should we construe "a spoon of relief"? As a dose of digestive medicine? And what does Beddoes mean by the "neck of a stork"? A neck long enough to make the act of swallowing visible to the vindictive onlooker? Whatever the semantic minutiae, the noisy tirade contrasts with the father's dignified silence: Now Harpagus said not a word, Did no eye-water spill: His heart replied, for that had heard, And hearts' replies are still.

Isbrand delights in this stoicism—even more impressive in its self-control than the "fiat voluntas tua" of his Herodotan counterpart ("Astyages asked him, 'Know you what beast’s flesh you have eaten?' 'Yea,' he said, I know, and all the king does is pleasing to me'"—1:157)—and makes it central his "Application" (the aenos of the fable). As further evidence of his selfcontrol, Beddoes laces the song with a ludic refrain that might have come from a nursery game—"We've played at "kid for child"—in which the two distinct meanings ("baby goat"; "offspring") eventually elide. Astyages had enquired, in mockery of an attentive host, whether the food meets with his guest's approval—"Hast thou broth enough to thy kid"—but Harpagus retorts that terrible phrase on his tormentor's head: "Thou'rt slave to him, who should be dead: / There's kid for child, and who has won?" To appreciate the cold, Machiavellian nature of this response, one need only set against the torrential tirade that Seneca assigned to Atreus in similar circumstances— . . . sustines tantum nefas gestare, Tellus? non ad infernam Styga tenebrasque mergis rupta et ingenti via ad chaos inane regna cum rege abripis. [Canst thou endure, O Earth, to bear a crime so monstrous? Why dost not burst asunder and plunge thee down to the infernal Stygian shades and, by a huge opening to void chaos, snatch this kingdom with its king away?]13

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—or the more succinct (but nonetheless intense) response of Shakespeare's Saturninus: "Die, frantic wretch, for this accursed deed" (Titus Andronicus 5.3.64). "The Songs by the Deaths" (p. 92) can be viewed as a miniature masque. It comprises a triptych, the first panel of which, "Song in the Air," brings the disembodied aerial sounds of The Tempest to mind ("Where should this music be? i' the air or the 'arth"—1.2.390), and represents yet another kletikon, one that invites the dead to midnight revels. Working back from the idiomatic synonym for a skull—"death's head"—Beddoes equates "death" with an entire skeleton. This creates an effect of discomposure, for it multiplies something more ordinarily conceived as a singular absolute: "Fie, for shame! / Deaths, to stand painted there so lazy." I haven't been able to discover any fresco along these lines, but an approximation of sorts can be found in a modello for Philip II's funeral in 1598—two skeletons upholding the king's achievement above the high altar, and four additional overscale skeletons on plinths against the wall.14 Nor have I found any full-scale skeletal orgies, though "Tam O' Shanter" provides a precedent of sorts, its "deaths" functioning as guéridons, though whether reduced to bone or covered in putrefying flesh Burns doesn't say: Coffins stood round like open presses, That shaw'd the dead in their last dresses; And by some devilish cantraip sleight Each in its cauld hand held a light, By which heroic Tam was able To note upon the holy table A murderer's banes in gibbet-airns; Twa span-lang, wee, unchristen'd bairns; A theife new-cutted from a rape— With his last gasp his gab did gape; Five tomahawks, wi' blude red rusted; Five scymitars, wi' murder crusted;15

Some of these details seem to have found their way into "The Songs by the Deaths," for the bony "relics" (adult and infantile) that Burns places on the satanic altar appear in the next "panel" of Beddoes's masque: "The death of the giant with petrified bones; / The death of the infant who never drew breath" (p. 93). In Holbein's Totentanz a single skeleton irrupts into tableaux of ordinary life, but perhaps Beddoes also knew The Nuremberg Chronicle (1493), one engraving of which (by Michael Wolgemut) shows a lively entrelacement of skeletons, some beceremented, some unclothed, all dancing to the music of a shawm.16 One can note in passing that,

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possibly also inspired by Wolgemut, the French poet Henri Cazalis would imagine a similar "Danse macabre" later on in the century— Through the gloom, white skeletons pass, Running and leaping in their shrouds. Zig, zig, zig, each one is frisking. The bones of the dancers are heard to crackBut hist! of a sudden they quit the round,17

—and that Saint-Saëns turned it into a "melodie" (or French Lied) and subsequently into a tone poem. In the latter, a xylophone suggests the rattle of bone against bone, an effect anticipated throughout this Lillputian masque: "as we rattle in the moonlight pale"; others dance fantastically to a rattling music; "White and clattering." The "ghosts' high noon" episode in W. S. Gilbert's Ruddigore, a later reworking of skeletons at play, might owe as much to Beddoes as to Cazalis—"When the night wind howls in the chimney cowls . . . Then is the spectres' holiday—then is the ghosts' high noon!18—and his animated fresco might also have inspired a coup de théâtre in the same operetta: "The Pictures step from their frames and march round the stage"(p. 524). Isbrand's delight in Thersitian mockery resurfaces once again, for just as the aborted foetus of his "Song" had turned nightingales into nasal puritans, so the deaths equate their cacophony with birdsong: "And, as we rattle in the moonlight pale; / Wanderers shall think 'tis the nightingale." The very fact of their dancing also registers as satire, since dance has traditionally symbolized society as it goes about its task of orderly procreation: In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie— A dignified and commodious sacrament. Two and two, necessarye conjunction, Holding eche other by the hand or arm Which betokeneth concorde.19

Beddoes offers instead a sacrament of indignity and uncommodiousness, and, in opposition to Elyot's hieratic order, tumbles out the contents of an ossuary, emblem of the chaos and injustice of life. A persisted hint of the nursery—"Boys and girls come out to play"—makes the irony all the more corrosive, as do the rollicking dactyls of the first line: Mummies and skeletons, out of your stones; Every age, every fashion, and figure of Death: The death of the giant with petrified bones;

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The death of the infant who never drew breath. (p. 93)

"Every age, every fashion" has a nice ambiguity, suggesting a conspectus of aeons as well as the stages of human life. The giant with petrified bones hints at the biblical myth of Num. 13.33—"And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight"—and also at the clumsy fullness of adulthood, contrasted with the delicate skeleton of the stillborn (or aborted) child. Death the leveller becomes Death the reveller, for whereas the traditional Totentanz shows live persons participating very reluctantly in its dance, these skeletons caper in celebration of their deadness. Most records of levelling have been solemn and plangent— Scepter and crown Must tumble down And in the dust be equal made With the poor crooked scythe and spade.20

—but, in order to "uncypress death" (the aim of Death's Jest-Book, as expounded in a verse epistle to Procter), Beddoes exults in the oddities that arise when the social hierarchy implodes: The emperor and empress, the king and the queen, The knight and the abbot, friar fat, friar thin

The random roll-call jumbles together the mediaeval estates, and blurs the lines of history. How bizarre that an emperor and his consort should disport on a village green, and how odd that a knight, emblem of the active life, should clankingly dance beside an abbot, emblem of the contemplative. Nor should we overlook the obese friar, for whom the exercise would be exhausting, and the ascetic one, for whom it would have seemed ungodly. The masque ends with a coda spoken by "One with a scythe, who has stood sentinel"—a detail borrowed from A Midsummer Night's Dream 2.2.24-25: "Hence, away! Now all is well; / One aloof stand sentinel." As an anatomy student Beddoes would naturally have known that, without any tissue to hold them in place, the ossicles of the ear (malleus, incus and stapes) would have been lost along the way: Although my old ear Hath neither hammer nor drum, Methinks I can hear Living skeletons come. (p. 93)

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"Living skeletons" approximates the prolepsis toward the end of Hamlet ("Horatio, I am dead, / Thou livest"—5.2.343-44), and offers yet another Beddovian vision of death-in-life. No longer can the wall in Pyramus and Thisbe lay claim to being "the wittiest partition" (A Midsummer Night's Dream 5.1.165). That in "Song of the Deaths" is equally voluble: And, like an old hen, the wall Cries 'Cluck! Cluck! Back to my gizzard; ''Tis warm, though it's stony, 'My chickens so bony.'

Here the simile colonizes and reconstitutes the object it evokes, for the use of "gizzard," which comes from the Latin gigeria, expressly refers to the stomach of a bird, and picks up the hen-like solicitousness of "Cluck! Cluck!"—itself a parody of Matt. 23.37 ("how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings"). Conceits also figure in the "Drinking Song," but conceits such cogency and dignity as turn it into a little masterpiece. Beddoes duplicates the single lip of the cup—"My goblet's golden lips are dry" (p. 94)—and then superposes upon them another simile, the cupped structure of a rose, before the first has even had a chance to solidify. The dissolution of the one into the other finds support in the seeming tautology of "goblet's cup," which detaches the convex part of the vessel from the pedestal, paralleling the division of flower from stem: And as the rose doth pine For dew, so doth for wine My goblet's cup;

The poem's shape on the page half reproduces the form of the vessel, and so amounts to a technopaegnion of sorts, the dimeters creating a narrow stem that is embellished with a tetrameter annulet, and the inverted "cup" finding embodiment in the chiasmus ("rose . . . for dew" / "for wine . . . cup"). So organically has the poet bonded container and flower that we can almost envisage a wilting of its metal substance (like the watch casings in Dali's Persistence of Memory), while the liquid that it receives hovers ontologically between wine and fresh water: "Rain, O! rain, or it will die; / Rain, fill it up. The second strophe reverses descending rain into ascending vapour: Arise and get thee wings to-night,

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Aetna! And let run o'er Thy wines, a hill no more, But darkly frown A cloud, where eagles dare not soar, Dropping rain down.

This confronts us with the adunaton of a flying mountain, Beddoes addressing the volcano as fervently as Isaiah had cried to Zion—"Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee" (60.1)—and then demythologizing its wings as the shafts of vapour that sprout from its shoulders. Red and gold lava paraphrases the red wine that had earlier rained down the side of the golden cup (the "crater" of a volcano transliterates the Greek țȡĮIJȘȡ, or mixing bowl), and, as a result, the life-giving abundance of liquor ("my cup runneth over"— Ps. 23.5) finds itself inverted in the death-dealing magma that travels down the slope (vine-covered in its lower reaches) to the human settlements below. The "rain" of ash and molten rock likewise flypes the nurturing downpour of stanza one, a swing from the beautiful to the sublime and from life to death that goes once more to the heart of Death's Jest-Book. Whereas Herbert's "Grace" makes a repeated, litanic plea for renewal— My stock lies dead, and no increase Doth my dull husbandrie improve: O let thy graces without cease Drop from above!21

—this bizarre chanson à boire begs for the antitype of fertilizing rain. Eagles, birds that traditionally renew their sight in the sun, find only darkness and death in a cloud of unknowing. How stark and unprepared the diptych is, and yet how potent in its starkness. "The Song that Wolfram Heard in Hell" can be dated quite precisely, for, as Donner points out, the "first version of 'the ravens of Cairo' we know to have been written during the last days of October 1824" (p. xxxii). The title implies that its surreal landscape belongs to the underworld, and that its protagonists are probably Adam and Eve who, metempsychosed into crows, are serving out an eternal sentence. Alternatively, the participants could be a crow-like succubus and incubus since the refrain invokes two devils (numerically equivalent to the two crows) that converse in a cadenced recitative—the last claim based on the resemblance between "Is that the wind dying" and the "dying fall" in Twelfth Night 1.1.4. One should also bear in mind the cadential character of many corvid calls, a harsh glissando from an upper to a lower note. The

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birds' provenance from "Cairo" contributes to the onomatopoeic representation of that call, the town's name offering slurred approximation to "carrion" and trapping them in a chiasmus ("carrion crow" / "crow of Cairo"), a huis-closclaustrophobia intensified by the droning, tautological repetition of "old." Relentless rain, hardly typical of Egypt, alludes to Canto XIV in the Inferno ("Even so rained down the everlasting heat"22) and inverts it. Or perhaps it amplifies the portent with which Milton signalized the fall of humankind: "Sky low'r'd, and muttering Thunder, some sad drops / Wept at completing of the mortal Sin / Original".23 The crow's stoical endurance ("He sat in a shower and let it flow / Under his tail and over his crest— emphasis mine) implies that, as later in the case of Lord Jim, he has to submit himself to "the destructive element".24 Although Beddoes would have known that birds can waterproof themselves with secretions from the uropygial gland, he denies Adam Crow that resource, leaving him waterlogged and unable to fly. At first take, his nest is a conventional affair of sticks in a tree, weighed down not only by himself but also by the marrow in his beak—a hint that the bones upon which he has been gorging are comparatively fresh. If so, we could adduce a new reading for the refrain and connect the "two devils that blow / Through a murderer’s bones" with the vulture of the Prometheus myth and of Aeneid VI— "rostroque immanis voltur obunco /immortale iecur tondens fecundaque poenis / viscera" [and a monstrous vulture with crooked beak gnaws at his deathless liver and vitals fruitful for anguish]"25—the murderer in question punished by the perpetual demarrowing of his bones. Since the second stanza tells us that the marrow originates in a pharaoh, we can infer that he has been guilty of mass-slaughter, and that king and murderer are one and the same. To drive the point home, Beddoes arbitrarily rebuilds the nest in Cleopatra’s skull. No actual crow could have flown into a tree with something so heavy, but perhaps the poet was thinking of a shield in Ivanhoe—"a raven in full flight, holding in its claws a skull, and bearing the motto Gare le Corbeau"26: Ho! Eve, my grey carrion wife, When we have supped on king's marrow, Where shall we drink and make merry our life? Our nest it is queen Cleopatra's skull, 'Tis cloven and cracked, And battered and hacked, But with ears of blue eyes it is full.

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Why the female crow should be grey is not immediately apparent unless the metempsychosis of Eve has transferred the human signature of age to the bird, and turned it a "sable silver'd" (Hamlet 1.2.242). Or perhaps she has feasted so greedily that she has smeared marrow over her feathers. Not even a Neanderthal skull would have the capacity to seat two crows, but Beddoes blithely overrides the improbability to remind us that "the noble dust of Alexander" can end up "stopping a bung-hole" (Hamlet 5.1.19798). By withholding the upper case from king and queen (the latter jarring against the capital C of "Cleopatra), he likewise stresses the democratizing force of death. Shakespeare (and Plutarch) tell us that Cleopatra died in a prehumously erected "monument." Beddoes seems to have thought that it might have been violated and that contemptuous injuries were visited upon her bones in retribution for her Ozymandian bad rule. (One thinks of the bayonet thrusts still to be seen in a portrait of Marie-Antoinette.) Being cloven and cracked, the skull can't hold water well, but the persistent rain keeps topping it up, and allows the crows to wash down their marrow. "Blue eyes" strike an odd note in an Egyptian context, but perhaps they belonged to a Circassian slave—emblem, once again, of unjust tyranny. Whatever their immediate meaning, their blueness momentarily hints at unclouded skies, an illusive glimpse of sunshine that reinforces the dreariness of the irremissive rain. "From the German" apparently translates a poem by Ernst Raupach, though commentators (myself included) have been unable to locate the text in question. In view of this, Donner speculates that it "may well be a parody of his style rather than a translation" (p. 699), though the presence in the title of "From" (the preposition of excerption) pretends that Beddoes made his extract from source. Whatever the case, the result is compelling, and owes its success as much to the verbal dexterity and aptness of its texture as to grand guignol of its content: 'Come with me, thou gentle maid, The stars are strong and make a shade Of yew across your mother's tomb; Leave your chamber's vine-leaved gloom, Leave your harp-strings, loved one, 'Tis our hour,' the robber said. (p. 95)

The opening "Come" identifies the poem as a kletikon, and looks ahead to the invitation of Heine's "Tragödie"—"Entflieh mit mir und sei mein Weib, / Und ruh an meinem Herze aus"27 [Oh, fly with me and be my wife, / Rest on my heart wherever I roam28], in which an imprudent elopement also issues in death. "Tragödie," however, is about accidental loss of life,

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and in no way undermines the love that prompts it. In Raupach, by contrast, the speaker invites his beloved to death by his hand, recalling Claudius' "Der Tod und das Mädchen"—"Gib deine Hand, du schön und zart Gebilt"29—in which Death, a "wilder Knochenmann," also makes a tender, attentive overture to innocent girlhood. "Gentle" here retains some of its mediaeval meaning since the maiden has a harp in her boudoir, and creepers trained about the window. The contrast between that gentility and "robber" betokens a Sturm und Drang fascination with outlawed isolatos such as we find in Die Räuber, Julian Budden having remarked that the protagonists of that movement "are all rebels without causes" and that in Schiller's drama Karl von Moor presents himself as "Jimmie Porter in Gothic script."30 We are dealing with just such an avatar of Moor here, but rather more bloody. He too has entered the life of an Amalia look-alike, though one can't be sure if he be a literal or a metaphorical robber (the thief of her virginity and then of her life). His victim's defencelessness recalls such figures as Emily in The Mysteries of Udolpho, women who lack secure family structures that would otherwise have prevented their exploitation. While the mother's tomb generates a measure of Gothic pathos, it also explains how, in the absence of the counsel she would have provided, the seducer has insinuated himself into the daughter's life. The silky collective with which he clothes his murderous project—"'Tis our hour" (emphasis mine)—and the way in which the prepositional displacement of "with" by "to" enacts the idea of sexual congress. "Come with me" followed by "Come to me" furthermore shows a character as persuasive as it is heartless. Additional disquiet arises from the fact that their (illegitimate?) baby is ill with a fever. The second stanza shows even greater compression and density, reduplicating the "shade" of the first in a wood so dark that it becomes a night within a night, while the maid's "harpstrings" find a mocking antiphon in a forgathering of screech-owls. What is more, two graves proleptically impress themselves upon the heath, indicating that the robber plans to kill the child after despatching his lover: To the wood whose shade is night, Went they in the owls' moonlight. As they passed, the common wild Like a murderous jester smiled, Dimpled twice with nettly graves.

While the figure of Triboulet in Hugo's Le Roi s'amuse (1832) might have inspired the oxymoronic "murderous jester", Beddoes has been wholly original in animizing the common in the way he does. Such a space would

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ordinarily imply the proximity of houses (and therefore of human succour), but this one has reverted to nature, and the nettles, signature of vanished human habitation, provide an image of neglect. Since dimples ordinarily register as depressions, and since new graves start out as tumuli above the level of the earth, these similaic ones must flash far into the future, to a point when the graves have actually subsided. We feel a measure of shock when a second-person pronoun involves us in the scene ("You may mark her garment white / In the night-wind how it waves"), making us impotent witnesses to its horror. If, like a white flag, that garment signals surrender, must we assume that the woman has lost the contest, and lies on the ground while the gusty wind plays with her dress? Or does its waving parody gestures of reassurance and contact at a point where these have become impossible? The anadiplosis, by picking up the wind and leaving the garment behind, all but suppresses the fact of murder lodged in the transition ("In the night-wind how it waves: / The night-wind to the churchyard flew"), while a different sort of parallelism connects the victim's mother, buried beneath a yew tree in the first strophe, and the night-wind's maternal vocative: The night-wind to the churchyard flew And whispered underneath the yew; 'Mother churchyard, in my breath I've a lady's sigh of death.'

The consummation of the one aerial presence in the other ("breath"; "sigh") has an erotic charge at odds with the murder it records, just as the "wet" phallic knife in the robber's hand hovers macabrely between hints of life-giving semen and life-letting blood. Rhyme always works by displacement, but there are occasions when the word-yieldings become semantic in and of themselves. "Knife" supplants the "wife" that a husband ought traditionally to clasp, the implement of death parodying the membrum virile. At no point does Beddoes supply a motive for the murder, letting it register simply as a psychopathic whim. "The Ghosts' Moonshine" has refrain for the most part identical with that for "The Song that Wolfram Heard in Hell," and suggests the endless re-enactment of a crime—a topic associated with "justice" in the afterlife, as in Book VI of The Aeneid. Like its predecessor, the lyric renders terrifying actions through a semblant language of tenderness and love, and begins like an epithalamion. But instead of the warmth and intimacy of the bed-chamber, it exposes the lovers to a Lear-like thunderstorm instead: It is midnight, my wedded;

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Chapter Eight Let us lie under The tempest bright, my dreaded, In the warm thunder: Tremble and weep not! What can you fear? My heart's best wish is thine,— That thou were white, and bedded On the softest bier, (pp. 95-96)

"Warm thunder" reads like an oxymoron, but could just as readily signify a mental derangement in the speaker. The weeping woman must know that a psychopath has her at bay, his madness evident in the discordant rhyme of "bedded" with "dreaded." A husband would ordinarily to wish comfort on his wife, but even when the speaker seems to conform to type, we become aware of the jarring deflection of "bed" by "bier." Beddoes clarifies the situation no further, however, and simply subjoins the recycled (and inscrutable) refrain from "The Song Wolfram Overheard in Hell." Stanza two seems to place us inside the bedchamber of the victim, where she has woken up to her tormentor's sinister whisperings, a shift typical of Beddoes's fluid, oneiric disposition of space. Nor can we rule out the possibility that the speaker might be Death itself, a Claudian "Knochenmann" who invites the maid to the consummation of the grave. How else to construe "poor old dead," the collective sense of the "old dead" in the Raupach translation having given way to something individual and specific ("His spade, it / Is only making—")?: His spade, it Is only making— (Tremble and weep not! What do you crave?) Where yonder grasses twine, A pleasant bed, my maid, that Children call a grave.

Beddoes has reworked the reassurances of Claudius' "Tod" into an attentive parenthetic aside that delays the arrival of the object of "making." Innocence often centres on the ignorance of death, and in Howard Nemerov's "Lives of Gulls and Children," the subjects turn away from extinction because they, "being humankind, / Had homes to go to, and a bed this side of death."31 But in the zany, psychotic world of Death's JestBook, Beddoes inverts this idea, giving children a cold-eyed sense of their mortality, and letting the adult voice deal in euphemism: "A pleasant bed, my maid, that / Children call a grave." Twining grasses suggest both the wreaths of an epithalamion and the plaiting of a cradle (as in the story of

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Moses in the bullrushes), but they also sound out a memento mori: "all flesh is as the grass" (1 Pet. 1.24). A new voice joins the polyphony in the final stanza, that of a spectatornonce reader who interrogates the murderer about his action: What dost thou strain above her Lovely throat's whiteness? A silken chain, to cover Her bosom's brightness? Tremble and weep not: what dost thou fear? —My blood is spilt like wine, Thou hast strangled and slain me, lover, Thou hast stabbed me, dear,

What appears to the guileless onlooker as an act of tender beautification has a murderous undertow. A suggestion that the woman is naked ("cover" as opposed, say, to "adorn") enhances the sense of sexual psychopathy, and so does the superaddition of stabbing to strangulation. "What dost thou fear" recalls the vain attempts of the father to reassure the son in Goethe's "Erlkönig" ("Mein Sohn, was birgst du so bang dein Gesicht" [My son, why do you hide your face in terror]32—but when the woman records the violence twice over, we realize how well-founded her terror has been, even though a discordia concors of affectionate vocatives ("lover"; "dear") punctuates her cries. The refrain undergoes an incremental adjustment at this point, but remains as impenetrable as ever. Perhaps, though, the reduction of two ghosts to one goblin suggests that spirits can experience a subjective kind of second death, and that they can be resurrected to experience it time after time. One could term the "Lines Written in the Album of One Who Had Watched the Progress of the American and French Revolutions" a "sonnettone," that augmentative suffix "one" pointing to its growth beyond the statutory fourteen lines. Beddoes has written an English sonnet in essence, but an "error for Allah" occurs in the second quatrain, where the line about depletion and failure ("Grows pale and shrinks and dies in its dismay"—p. 97) receives no answering rhyme in a way that enacts its own sterility, its incapacity to couple. The e rhyme that displaces the expected d, being a constituent of the ensuing quatrain, creates a median couplet, and so achieves an effect of triumphant finality as it celebrates the occlusion of the old world order by the new: "and flowery grace / Covers the sand, and man doth come again / And live rejoicing in the new-born plain." This image has its roots in Shelley's Queen Mab, whose promise of

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millenarian redemption derives in turn from Isa. 35.1 ("the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose"): 'Those deserts of immeasurable sand, Whose age-collected fervours scarce allowed A bird to live, a blade of grass to spring, Where the shrill chirp of the green lizard's love Broke on the sultry silentness alone, Now teem with countless rills and shady woods, Cornfields and pastures and white cottages;['] (p. 841)

Beddoes supplements this Shelleyan precedent with additional material from Isaiah, this time his exultation over the ruined city in Chapter 34: 13 And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof: and it shall be an habitation of dragons, and a court for owls. 14 The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow; the screech owl also shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest. 15 There shall the great owl make her nest, and lay, and hatch, and gather under her shadow: there shall the vultures also be gathered, every one with her mate.

However, he inverts that judgement, redefining the city's decline as a human advance, as a toppling of superstition: As an almighty night doth pass away From an old ruinous city in a desart, And all its cloudy wrecks sink into day: While every monstrous shape and ghostly wizard That dwelled within the cavernous old place, Grows pale and shrinks and dies in its dismay:

Whereas at the conclusion of The Dunciad, darkness seems allencompassing and invincible—"And Universal Darkness buries All"33— Beddoes's post-Enlightenment confidence allows him to attach to "almighty night" an indefinite article, putting a term on its obscurity and the errors it engenders. "Cloudy" furthermore denatures the solid fabric as earlier in Prospero's sic transit gloria (The Tempest 4.1)— And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

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Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind.

—and later in Little Dorrit—"Up here in the clouds, everything was seen through cloud, and seemed dissolving into cloud"34 All this by way of a protasis. The apodosis then collates the data with the figurative phantasms that, in the darkness of the Dark Ages, have loomed up and blotted out the sun. "The shadow of Rome's Death" centres primarily on the eclipse of the empire's culture and its informing humanism, but the line also contains a secondary, anti-clerical reading. "Rome's Death" could refer to the intellectual strangulations committed by the Catholic church (as in its persecution of Galileo). The secularism implicit of the American and French revolutions testifies by contrast to a triumph of the Enlightenment. By the same token, Rome's own "cloud-capp'ed towers" take the form of "a great superstitious snake" that recalls the python of Apollo, hymned in Byron's ecphrasis of the Belvedere: Or view the Lord of the unerring bow, The God of life, and poesy, and light— The Sun in human limbs array'd, and brow All radiant from his triumph in the fight;35

When the serpent uncurls from "the pale temples of the world," one can either assume that Beddoes has created a personification with physiological temples, or that the temples are fanes, religious buildings turned pale by the prospect of their eclipse as in Blake's "London" ("How the chimney-sweeper's cry / Every blackening church appals"36). "Song, on the Water" (p. 97) is a propemptikon that takes the invocation of a "calm sea and prosperous voyage" for granted, and devotes itself to harmonizing the mind of an agitated passenger with his peaceful surrounds. Although he seems to be returning from a successful expedition, and wondering what reception his lady-love will give him, he remains on the margins of the poem. The second-person address, which yields to a first-person plural in the second strophe, suggests rather that the song is the utterance of a minstrel who behaves as David vis-à-vis Saul: "And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp, and played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him" (1 Sam. 16.23). Beddoes begins with an appositive run of adjectives not unlike that in "Twicknam Garden" ("Blasted with sighs, and surrounded with tears"37):

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Chapter Eight Wild with passion, sorrow-beladen, Bend the thought of thy stormy soul On its home, on its heaven, the loved maiden; And peace shall come at her eyes' control.

A striking dissonance obtains between "outer" and "inner weather"38 for, like the speaker in Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode" ("I see, not feel how beautiful they are"39), the addressee lacks emotional connection with the peaceful scene, and likewise needs to attune his feelings to the objects of his vision. The minstrel evokes the absent maiden—the cause of his rufflement—by an act of mental concentration, since "heaven" contains within its verbal outline the idea of "haven," the literal and figurative goal of the troubled journeyer. Her eyes, which metaphorically control the approach of the boat to its mooring, function as navigational beacons. Here Beddoes inserts a long Homeric simile, as artificial and polished as the images of a manieroso painting, (Alessandro Allori's Pearl Fishers comes to mind): Even so night's starry rest possesses With its gentle spirit these tamed waters, And bids the wave with weedy tresses Embower the ocean's pavement stilly Where the sea-girls lie, the mermaid daughters, Whose eyes, not born to weep, More palely lidded sleep, Than in our fields the lily, And sighing in their rest More sweet than is its breath, And quiet as its death Upon a lady's breast.

"Starry rest" refers to the immobility of the stars as well as the immobility of the sleep that night ushers in, and the participial framing and control of violence ("tamed") reminds us of the man "wild with passion" whom this tableau is meant to reduce to calmness. For decorative and emblematic purposes, Beddoes has taken the known irregularity of the sea-bed, and planed it in the manner of the rough places in Isa. 40.4. It is furthermore slabbed with marble and canopied with pendant weed such as one would find in the Sargasso Sea (not "the oozy woods which wear / The sapless foliage of the ocean"40). The currents still themselves to a point where— again as in the Sargasso Sea—they becalm the very water, the verbless repose of the appositive phrases putting all motion on hold.

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Not only do the nixies enjoy there a life of perfect physical calm but they are also incapable of weeping, a datum that puts them "All breathing human passion far above," like the marmoreal lovers in Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn." The symmetry of the poem requires that "our fields" be construed in marine terms, and indeed the sixteenth division of the SOED lemma—"A large stretch, an expanse, of sea, sky, ice, snow"—makes it possible to balance them against "our oar" in the second strophe, and so to read the lilies as Nymphaeas floating on the sea. This botanical aberration needn't trouble us unduly, for a contemporary lithograph of the ballerina Fanny Cerrito in Ondine also has her ankle deep in sea water ridden by water lilies.41The death of those lilies upon a woman's bosom suggest that Beddoes had Keats in mind ("Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast . . . / And so live ever—or else swoon to death"—p. 372), but "Bright Star" appeared in the Plymouth and Devonport Weekly Journal only in 1838.42 The addressee of the second stanza differs so markedly from that in the first that one must assume either that a new figure has entered the picture, or that the old one has undergone a change of mind. If we are dealing with a knight returning from a crusade or a joust, the speaker’s counsel now centres on the need to moderate his triumphalism with the gracious attributes of other legendary lovers. Beddoes once again forges an extended simile and once again recurs to sleeping mermaids. He presents them as the source of the moon's opalescent beauty, which it borrows by bestowing a universal kiss upon their persons: And kisseth their limbs o'er; Her lips where they do quaff, Strike starry tremors off, As from the waves our oar.

We can read those tremors either as bursts of phosphorescence or as the pixilated disintegration of the moon's reflection by the oars of the trireme (or similar vessel). The "Song Translated from the German of Walther von der Vogelweide" offers a perfect rendering of that thirteenth-century Minnesänger's "blumenfreudigen und von Tanzlust beschwingten Frühlingsliedern"43 [flower-delighting and toe-tapping spring songs]. Beddoes keeps close to his original, even to the extent of keeping the Germanic "Tandaradei" refrain, which others might have been tempted to convert into a "Fa-la-la" or a "Hey nonny no." Two felicities deserve commendation—the specificity of "daisied ground", which the participle beflowers the blank "heide"44 of the original; and the way in which "gebrochen bluomen unde gras" (p. 699) becomes "Grass and blossoms, broken and shed." Not only

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does this guarantee a lusty "green-gown"45 but it also allows a romantic rain of petals to "sanctify" the union. In one of his letters from Germany, Beddoes commended an English translator of Uhland because he kept "the metres of his original," but deplored his "conventional poetical language of the fashionable modern potters" (Works, pp. 682-83). This version of Vogelweide both keeps the metre and avoids linguistic "pottery." "The Songs at Amala's Wedding" is a suite poem, all it components linked in one way or another to the nuptial theme. A chorus of separated male and female voices provides the opening epithalamion, voices apparently belonging to the sort of omnipresent spirits we find in The Tempest 5.1.33ff.—"elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves"— since they witness physical intimacies from which ordinary human vassals would have been excluded. Beddoes might have drawn inspiration for the female antiphon from Titian's Diana and Actaeon, which has a pyramidal grouping of bathers surmounted by an architectural focus, albeit a bucranium on a plinth rather than a statue of Venus. The last can be more definitively related to the Cnidian Venus, which stood in a small shrine, open at the front so that pilgrims might see the figure of the goddess, white and radiant in contrast to the surrounding greenery. She was about to step into a ritual bath, and one hand still held the shift which she had drawn from her shoulders. Her lips were parted in a gentle smile; yet she had not altogether laid aside the majesty of an Olympian.46

When, therefore, the female chorus reports on bathing with Amala, it figures at the same time as an entourage of servants and a cluster of naiads that happen to share the lake with her: We have bathed, where none have seen us, In the lake and in the fountain, Underneath the charmed statue Of the timid, bending Venus, When the water-nymphs were counting In the waves the stars of night, And those maidens started at you, Your limbs shone through so soft and bright. But no secrets dare we tell, For thy slaves unlace thee, And he, who shall embrace thee, Waits to try thy beauty's spell. (p. 99)

"None have seen us" might seem to refer a Diana-like sequestration from the male gaze, but it could also indicate the physical invisibility of the

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singers. The fact that the naiads can count the reflected stars measures the windless peace of the tableau, and also prepares us for a traditional Petrarchan comparison of beauty to a heavenly body, Amala's limbs presented as another moon with astral attendants. By characterizing Venus herself as "timid," shrinking from her imminent eclipse, Beddoes further establishes the mortal's superior charms. While we could construe the water-nymphs of the first stanza either figuratively, as Amala's mortal hand-maidens, or literally, as genii loci, the second strophe seems to come down in favour of disembodied spirits. The intimacy hymned by the male voices—"thine eye, in beauty swimming, / Kissing"—suggests that they are creatures along the lines of Pope's Ariel rather than flesh-and-blood attendants on the groom, notwithstanding the phallic imagery that hints at orgasm: "Kissing, we rendered up the sceptre, / At whose touch the startled soul / Like an ocean bounds and gushes." Given their common centre, these lyrics could be construed as forming a miniature cantata, the chorus establishing the marital context, and the other poems contributory solos foregrounded from the larger ensemble. The first, an obsessive document of Frauendienst, focuses the bride on the wedding dais, excluding her consort from the frame. As a result, notwithstanding the epithalamion's connection with fertility rites, she registers as a secular Virgin Mary—"Maiden, thou sittest alone above, / Crowned with flowers, and like a sprite / Starrily clothed in a garment white" (p. 100). Even though C. S. Lewis has argued that "there is no evidence that the quasi-religious tone of medieval love poetry has been transferred from the worship of the Blessed Virgin,"47 just such a misprision seems to lie behind Beddoes's poem. Nobody reading that line out of context would guess that the subject were a bride. Undoing a standard formula, the speaker acknowledges that, far from being been haughty and cold like Petrarch's "bionda avignonese," the beloved has induced his misery by her very kindness: "Maiden, thou'st broken no vow to me, / But undone me alone with gentleness, / Wasting upon me glances that bless." By contrast, "Athulf's Song" bears comparison with arias of villainous Schadenfreude such as we find in Fidelio: "Ha! Ha! Ha! Welch ein Augenblick! / Die Rache werd' ich kühlen!" [Ha! Ha! What a moment is this!/ Now I can satisfy my revenge;]48 But in contrast to Beethoven's violent Sturm und Drang, Beddoes vectors the dark thoughts in delicate lyric verse, the opening strophe a tissue of antithetic metonyms. He weaves these into a chiasmus to dramatize the indivorcibility of death from life, and then summarizes the contrast in a compressive trimeter: A cypress-bough, and a rose-wreath sweet,

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Chapter Eight A wedding-robe, and a winding-sheet, A bridal bed and bier.

The festive chant of an epithalamion finds itself superposed upon the wail of a threnody—"And rosy, rosy the bed shall bloom, / And earthy, earthy, heap up the tomb." Here the vertical parallels between "rosy" and "earthy" have the effect of rerooting the gathered blooms, and so elide the marriage couch with the grave. "Sibylla's Dirge" relies on the idea of posthumous consciousness within the grave. Most dirges mourn, but this one affirms the tomb as a place of rest, the sibylline name of the speaker establishing her kinship with Gray's restful prophetess in "The Descent of Odin": Long on these mouldering bones have beat The winter's snow, the summer's heat, The drenching dews, and driving rain! Let me, let me sleep again. Who is he, with voice unblest, That calls me from the bed of rest?49

By stressing the exposure, distress and variability of life above ground, Gray makes the hibernacle of death all the more attractive. The same comfort obtains when Beddoes projects a snow-swept seascape and abandons it for the dark, secure enclosure of the ocean.Recoiling from the barren rock, we sink gratefully to graves made "happy" by exemption from that bleakness: We sail to the rock in the ancient waves, Where the snow falls by thousands into the sea, And the drowned and the shipwrecked have happy graves.

This paysage moralisé dramatizes the passage of time, for Beddoes has recycled the ocean engulfing identity from "To Silence" (p. 55), and so reinforced the opposition of permanent death and transient life in the first part of the poem: We do lie in the grass In the moonlight, in the shade Of the yew-tree. They that pass Hear us not. . . .

"They that pass" conveys both passage in the sense of motion and passage in the sense of ephemerality, both of which the poet offsets with a caesura

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that solidifies the shade of the rooted tree. The preposition of the phrases "in the shade" and "in the grass" suggests at first that the speakers sprawl above ground with the idyllic recumbency of the Eclogues—"Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi" [You, Tityrus, lie under your spreading beech's covert].50 "Under," however, more properly describes their situation in a space where even the glowworm (ordinarily a source of pale green light) is quenched by "night" in the manner of Milton's visible darkness: "We are afraid / They would envy our delight, / In our graves by glow-worm night." Such delight, meagre though it might seem, arises from their having at last escaped the sorrow that comes with life itself— "ǹȞșȡȦʌȠȢ ȚțĮȞȘ ʌȡȠijĮıȚȢ İȚȢ IJȠ įȣıIJȣȤİȚȞ" [I am a man, sufficient reason for being miserable51] as Menander puts it. The point is driven home by the tableau of the rock in the sea, the same objective correlatives that Tennyson would later adduce for misery in "Break, break, break." The "Dirge for Wolfram" recalls Olivia's "little melancholy air" in The Vicar of Wakefield, adducing death as the only solution to unhappy love: The only art her guilt to cover, To hide her shame from every eye, To give repentance to her lover, And wring his bosom—is to die.52

But there the similarity ends, for the balanced protasis and apodosis, each chiming symmetrically with the other across the two strophes, originate rather in such Metaphysical poems of suasion as Donne's Divine Meditations: "If faithful souls be alike glorified / As angels, then my father's soul doth see" (p. 312) and "If poisonous minerals, and if that tree, / Whose fruit threw death on else immortal us" (p. 312). Nor should we forget the subjunctive start of Marvell's "To his Coy Mistress"("Had we but World enough, and Time").53 Poems of this kind invariably issue in a somber adversative (Donne's "But if our minds to these souls be descried"—p. 312—and Marvell's "But at my back I alwaies hear"—1:28). Beddoes remains true to type in this regard, even though he tempers the rigour with solicitous tenderness: If thou wilt ease thine heart Of love and all its smart, Then sleep, dear, sleep; (p. 101)

This seems much closer to the tone of Cordelia in King Lear 4.4.15-18: All bless'd secrets, All you unpublish'd virtues of the earth,

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Spring with my tears! be aidant and remediate In the good man's distress!

But then the symmetry breaks down, and "die" replaces "sleep," returning us to the derangements of "The Ghosts' Moonshine," where endearments and violence clash by night ("Thou hast stabbed me, dear"): But wilt thou cure thy heart Of love and all its smart, Die, dear, die;

The overwhelming nature of this grief registers in the shift of scale. When we read "And not a sorrow hang any tear on your eyelashes," the metonymic "tear" suggests a sorrow almost under control, and so too does the distancing maniera of "hang," like the studied dew placements in A Midsummer Night's Dream 2.1.15 ("And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear"). However, the drop of salt water finds itself engulfed in a sea of sorrow that comes into being as the sufferer returns to consciousness: Lie still and deep, Sad soul, until the sea-wave washes The rim o' th' sun tomorrow, In eastern sky.

The notional contact between a round burning sun and the salt sea from which it rises parallels the soothing-irritant effect of tears upon the eyeball that the lifted lid reveals. Hence the catachresis of "folded," which draws attention to the way the lid's fleshy fan overlaps its orb. The blank verse declaration "Written in an Album at Clifton March, 1828" gives an early glimpse into Beddoes's self-doubts about his achievement, and amounts to one of the most poignant and personal of all his poems. An additional pathos springs from the fact that the album in question, as Donner points out, "was his cousin Zoë King's, the daughter of John King and Beddoes' aunt Emmeline Edgeworth" (Works, p. 700), the same woman whose remarkably liberal mind was praised by Kelsall, and who crossed the Channel to establish the facts of the poet's death. In his fecund youth, Beddoes could turn out verses at will; but now, at twenty-five, he suffers from a sense of creative depletion: Long have I racked my brains for rhymes to please, But vainly, for the time doth frown upon me, And throw the lights and shadows of reality Thro' my mind's caverns, melting in its glare

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The fairy-like inhabitants of twilight Which I essayed to summon. . . . (p. 102)

The "time" in "the time doth frown on me" might signify the Zeitgeist of the early nineteenth century and the industrial character that it had begun to acquire, but it might just as easily refer to that juncture in Beddoes's life when his studies had begun to compromise his inventiveness, and alcoholism to erode the mental agility and resourcefulness that rhyming demands of a poet. His choice of blank verse amounts, therefore, to an admission of failure. Furthermore, by presenting his mind as a cavern, he confirms a Platonic antagonism that has sprung up against the "unreality" of poetry ("For, tell me, do you think our prisoners could see anything of themselves of their fellows except as shadows thrown by the fire on the wall of the cave opposite them?"54). Because his own "magic" powers have waned, and the harsh rationalism of his medical studies has banished the "fairy-like inhabitants of twilight," he invests Zoë King with the powers that he himself has abjured or lost. He tries laboriously to work up the semblance of a poem— "Which I essayed to summon"—whereas she effortlessly sheds abroad "grace and gentleness," figuring her both as the bien aimée of Courtly Love and as an enchantress à la Vivian or Morgan la Fay. Beddoes's graceful compliment turns on the ambiguity of "charm," which signifies "social grace" on the one hand and "spell" on the other. Like the beauty in "L'Allegro," she functions as the "Cynosure of neighbouring eyes,"55 illuminated by her own loveliness, while men dwindle to vague and nameless presences outside her "circled halo." Like the speaker in "Adonais"—"He came at last, neglected and apart; / A herd-abandoned deer struck by the hunter's dart"56—Beddoes joins her circle as an outsider, but with none of the soterial and reprobate glamour of Shelley's Cain/Christ. The modifier "an almost unknown traveller" denies him even the mysteriousness of complete anonymity, for the poetic birthright that might have brought him fame has drowned in "the current of men's thoughts, wherein this world / Was pictured drearily." In contrast, the woman effortlessly rides that current like a "curled swan" (thatmanieroso adjective capturing the sinuous treble clef of the bird's neck). Associated through Leda with the idea of divine encounter, she irrupts into the derived reflection of a "haunted palace" (Psyche's, perhaps, where seeming and being fail to coincide) and, by breaking it to fragments, proves its epistemic falsity. The album, which, keeping up his necromantic metaphor, Beddoes presents as a book of spells, contains excerpts from her favourite poets, their content so profound that, in a striking synaesthetic metaphor, they

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weight its pages: "A book whose leaves were heavy with the music / Of poetry such as she loved to read." He has drawn on Shakespeare's 30th Sonnet, for it too contains the notional resurrection of vanished shades— "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought, / I summon up remembrance of things past"57—and its reference to "precious friends hid in death's dateless night" also anticipates the power with which Beddoes has invested the album: "The charms to raise the memory of the gone / Out of the night that had closed over them." The unusual displacement of "dead" by "gone" reduces extinction to something temporal rather than spatial, the more reversible for being rendered in these abstract terms. The poem becomes metafictive at this point, drawing attention to the album in the speaker's hands, which can no longer function as a spell-book when reality supervenes and forces the metaphor to fade. He couches his desire in the wistful subjunctive, knowing that he lacks power to execute it: The Traveller, grateful for so sweet a task, Fain would have spellbound fictions fairest shapes And sent them captive to pay homage there. But all in vain: the truth was restless in him, And shook his visionary fabrics down, As one who has been buried long ago And now was called up by a necromancer To answer dreadful questions; so compelled, He left the way of fiction and wrote thus: (pp. 102-03)

This recalls the passage in "Lamia" about the incompatibility of science and fancy: . . . Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine— Unweave a rainbow, . . . (pp. 176-77)

Keats had written his poem as an ex-apothecary, and Beddoes, a doctor to be, finds himself caught in a similar dilemma. For just as Newton had "dragged" the rainbow down from heaven where it had seemed to be mystic and impalpable, so Beddoes's "visionary fabric" collapses, unable to find purchase amid the empirical facts with which he has stocked his

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mind. So instead of writing about "haunted palaces" that recall the "magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn" (p. 209) as in Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," he can inscribe only a jeremiad of bitter self-analysis: 'Woe unto him whose fate hath thwarted him, Whose life has been 'mongst such as were not born To cherish in his bosom reverence, And the calm awe that comforteth the heart And lulls the yearnings of hope unfulfilled: Such have I been. And woe again to him Who in too late an hour presumptuously O'erhears a wish confessing to his soul, And must dismiss it to his discontent With scorn and laughter. Woe again to me! For now I hear even such an anxious voice Crying in my soul's solitude and bewailing That I had never in my childhood known The bud of this manifold beauteousness, And seen each leaf turn on its tender hinge Until the last few parted scarce and held Deep in their midst a heaven-reflecting gem; For then I might—oh vain and flattering wish!— I might have stood, though last, among the friends Where I am now the last among the strangers, And not have passed away as now I must Into forgetfulness, into the cold Of the open homeless world without a hope, Unless it be of pardon for these words:[']

The continuity between the phrasing of "Woe unto him whose fate hath thwarted him" and the prophetic monition of, say, Jer. 22.13—"Woe unto him that buildeth his house by unrighteousness"—points to a consciously prophetic stance, the archaic preposition "unto" doing homage to the AV, absent as it is from the Vulgate text—"Vae qui aedificat domum suam in injustitia."58 Beddoes also secures a vatic tone in the line "For now I hear even such an anxious voice / Crying in my soul's solitude," which picks up the "voice of him that crieth in the wilderness" (Isa. 40.3), but without its promise of messianic renewal. Beddoes makes the indictment increasingly personal, shifting from the third person ("And woe again to him") to the first ("Woe again to me"). Recalling a childhood during which he must have witnessed his father's dissections, he bewails its effect on his emotional Bildung in terms that look ahead to Louisa Gradgrind inHard Times:

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Chapter Eight 'How could you give me life, and take from me all the inappreciable things that raise it from the state of conscious death? Where are the graces of my soul? Where are the sentiments of my heart? What have you done, O father, what have you done, with the garden that should have bloomed once, in this great wilderness here?' She struck herself with both her hands upon her bosom. 'If it had ever been here, its ashes would save me from the void in which my whole life sinks.[']59

Beddoes bases his self-directed improperium on two issues. The first concerns the psychological damage his education has wrought, and its knock-on effect in his human relations. As a result he has become archetypal outcast—a flying Dutchman or wandering Jew—to whom domesticity and repose are denied. He would probably have known the German lyric "Der Wanderer" (Schmidt von Lübeck) which also presents a nexus between wandering and unhappiness: "Ich wandle still, bin wenig froh, / und immer fragt der Seufzer: wo?" [I wander still, and am seldom happy, my sighs always posing the question, "Where?"], to which the answer comes: "Im Geisterhauch tönt's mir zurück: 'Dort, wo du nicht bist, dort ist das Glück" [A ghost-like breeze intones the response: 'There, wherever you're absent, there happiness lies'] (p. 186). The second issue raised by the poem is the aesthetic (as opposed to personal) damage that an insufficiently developed imagination has wrought upon a man who could have been a great poet. Beddoes ironically recalls the way Keats exempts his nightingale from any knowledge of pain. "That I had never in my childhood known" duplicates "What thou among the leaves hast never known" (p. 207) in form, but at the same time inverts the content, since the experience of each differs from the other's. As so often, the image suspends itself on the cusp of alternative possibilities. Firstly, the deictic ("the bud of this manifold beauteousness"—emphasis mine) suggests that the poet has in mind the album into which he is transferring his text (in a verse letter to Procter he had called books "fat square blossoms"—p. 84). And secondly, because albums are largely florilegia (flower-gatherings), the bud can be read as an omnigenous compacting of the world's great writers. As a "multifoliate rose,"61 each individual petal representing a different author, it lodges at its heart a Platonic drop of dew such as Marvell celebrated, one that "Round in itself" encloses "the clear Region where 'twas born" (1:12). The lament "For then I might—oh vain and flattering wish!— / I might have stood, tho' last, among the friends / Where now I am last among the strangers" refers to a double alienation, first from the domestic hearth of Clifton—the Kings and the Edgeworths with whom the poet, so long abroad, can't

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manage any intimacy—and secondly from the literary world of London, which, after years of mind-straitening medical discipline, has also become as alien to him as his English relatives. But although he has failed to sustain the transcendent vision that would have offered an open sesame to the pantheon, Beddoes admits to having had glimpses of radiant otherness imaged through a dewdrop that momentarily reflects the moon, and which evaporates before the privilege can recur. This recalls both the doctrine of unsought, unearned grace, and its secular variant in Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality"—"O joy! That in our embers / Is something that doth live, / That nature yet remembers / What was so fugitive!"62. Nor should we forget Shelley's "spirit of delight," which, while too capricious to equate with the Platonic principle of beauty in Beddoes's poem, nonetheless causes a comparable sense of despair when it departs from the person it has inspired: "Rarely, rarely, comest thou, / Spirit of Delight! / Wherefore hast thou left me now / Many a day and night?" (p. 678). Beddoes's plangent anaphora represents the patterns of linkage and integration that he can no longer impose on his art: . . . Yet to have seen, tho' seldom, And to have fed me on that beauty's light, And to have been allowed to trace these thoughts, Are undeserved favours from my fortune.'—

The open-ended character of this language, reminiscent of Gray's childhood vocation to poetry—"Yet oft before his infant eyes would run / Such forms as glitter in the Muse's ray" (The Progress of Poesy", pp. 17677)—allows the poem to shift toward graceful compliment, presenting Zoë King as the spirit of beauty at the same time that it laments the missed opportunities that have prompted failure. The "Dedicatory Stanzas" comprise a suite of sonnets, the last of which concludes with a triplet instead of the more usual two-line apophthegm. The choice of this form implies a correlation between Beddoes's situation and Shakespeare's, both loving an inaccessible male object from afar, as in Sonnet 112: "You are my all the world, and I must strive, / To know my shames and praises from your tongue" (p. 58). But whereas Shakespeare conforms all his experience to the eidolon of the bien aimé—"Since I left you, mine eye is in my mind, / And that which governs me to go about, / Doth part his function, and is partly blind" (Sonnet 113, p. 59)—Beddoes admits that the quotidian world sometimes supervenes upon his transcendent love and partly betrays it:

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Chapter Eight And pardon, if the sick light of despair Usurp thy semblance oft, with tearful gleam Displaying haunted shades of tangled care In my sad scenes: . . .

But even though the poem remains intensely personal, it takes care to universalize the love to which it gives expression, opening up the experience to all like-minded readers, the "who" in "Who findeth" acting as a kind of "quis est homo": Who findeth comfort in the stars and flowers Apparelling the earth and evening sky, That moralize throughout their silent hours, And woo us heaven-wards till we wish to die; Oft hath he singled from the soothing quire, For its calm influence, one of softest charm To still his bosom's pangs, when they desire A solace for the world's remorseless harm.

The collocation of flowers and stars as vectors of profundity shows a debt to Wordsworth's "Intimations Ode" on the one hand ("To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears"—p. 462) and to The Merchant of Venice on the other ("There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st / But in his motion like an angel sings, / Still quiring to the young-ey'd cherubins"—5.1.60-62). Wordsworth has also supplied Beddoes with a further conceit, for "Apparelling the earth" recalls the sonnet "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge": "This city now, doth like a garment, wear / The beauty of the morning" (p. 214). But whereas the older Romantic often generalizes natural beauty into a collective "motion and a spirit" (p. 164), Beddoes follows Keats's particularizing procedure in his last sonnet, extracting a single star from the galaxy, and making it his tutelary genius: "Oft hath he singled from the soothing quire / For its calm influence, one of softest charm / To still his bosom's pangs." That sets up a protasis to which the second "stanza" (recte "sonnet," given its fourteen lines) provides an apodosis, while the third presents an expanded conclusion instead of the customary couplet. In this scheme, each sub-sonnet becomes a sonnetary component of a sonnet writ large. The parallel phrasing of "So thou, whom I have gazed on" aligns the subject with the chosen star, though we shall probably never learn his identity. If Donner has correctly associated the "loved longlost boy" (p. 111) of "Dream-Pedlary" with Bernard Reich (the student with whom Beddoes forged close ties in Göttingen), we could also plausibly advance

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Reich as the dedicatee of the "Dedicatory Stanzas." And even if we erred in doing so, the parallels would still obtain, for whoever the boy might be, he has clearly died an early death both in "Dream-Pedlary" and here, given his apotheosis in the final part of the sonnet amplifié. But whereas "Dream-Pedlary" denies the idea of life after death ("There are no ghosts to raise; / Out of death lead no ways; / Vain is the call"—p. 111), the "Dedicatory Stanzas" entertain it as a consoling possibility. Like Tennyson, Beddoes wonders if, beyond the grave, the soul becomes partly or wholly omniscient, able to read the thoughts of those it leaves behind. Not for nothing does he recall Keats's prayerful "Ode to Psyche" ("And pardon that thy secrets should be sung / Even into thine own soft-conched ear"—p. 211), apologizing to the dedicatee for his moral taint as someone still caught up in sublunary life: And pardon, if the sick light of despair Usurp thy semblance oft, with tearful gleam Displaying haunted scenes of tangled care In my mad scenes: soon shall a pearly beam, Shed from the forehead of my heaven's queen,— That front thy hand is pressed on,—bring delight. (pp. 104-05)

Depicting his vanished love with his hand resting on the moon, Beddoes translates the magniloquence of Seneca's Thyestes—"Aequalis astris gradior et cunctos super / altum superbo vertice attingens polum [Peer of the stars I move, and, towering over all, touch with proud head the lofty heavens.]64—into serene Platonic beatitude. Two lighting schemes inform the poem at this point—one febrile and lurid, associated with despair, and the other the "pearly beam" of the moon, usually an image of variableness, but here, by contact with the source of Beddoes's love, steady and redemptive. The contact of hand and lunar forehead seems to transform the transient "moony rain" of the first stanza (paraphrasing the astrological idea of in liquid emanations or "influences") into the stable perfection of the Timaean stars: Or look untouched down through the moony rain, Living and being worlds in bright content, Ignorant, not in scorn, of his affection's bent.

"Bright content" refers not only to happiness but also to an impermeable, spherical containédness, while Beddoes also sets the uncontaminated vertical descent of their light against his refracting affection, "bent" faintly anticipating the twentieth-century slang term for homoerotic desire. One

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need only suppress the apostrophe of "affections" to make a plural noun, qualified by an adjective. Not only are those affections skewed by unorthodoxy, but they also convey the idea of fragmentation, the star (and the beloved that it embodies) equating with IJȠ ʌĮȞIJİȜȦȢ ȠȞ (completeness of being), whereas terrestrial longing can rise only to broken eidola or reproductions. Bending, while primarily the body-posture of condescension, also conveys the prismatic breakage of the absolute into manageable fragments, gathered by him who is stranded below in an imperfect world: And so all sights, all musings, pure and fair, Touching me, raised thy memory to sight, As the sea-suns awakes the sun in air,— If they were not reflections, thou the light. Therefore bend hitherwards, and let thy mildness Be glassed in fragments through this storm and wildness.

His love should ennoble him and lead him upward, as in Goethe's "zieht uns hinan,"64 but here it has the opposite effect, sharing death's downward tug, and intermittently eclipsing its transcendent light with suicidal thoughts. I would argue on those grounds that this poem properly belongs with those written between 1829 and 1844, when Beddoes's despair had begun to mount toward its inevitable climax. The project of Death's JestBook has clearly failed, and the manic attempt to laugh death into insignificance has yielded to a predictably depressive sequel: "Nor frown, nor blame me, if, such charms between, / Spring mockery, or thoughts of dreadest night." And so the poem alternates images of love and death in a stroboscopic Liebestod. The proposition that "Death's darts are sometimes Love's," a Russian Roulette that mingles mortal arrows with amorous ones of Cupid's quiver, adduces natural instances of the paradox: Death's darts are sometimes Love's. So Nature tells, When laughing waters close o'er drowning men; When in flowers' honied corners poison dwells; When Beauty dies; and the unwearied ken, Of those who seek a cure for long despair, Will learn. Death hath his dimples everywhere; Love only in the cheek, which is to me most fair.

In the first stage of the coda, Beddoes rehearses the lesson of Keats's "Ode to Melancholy," the "flowers' honied corners" recalling how, in that poem, nectar turns to poison "while the bee-mouth sips" (p. 220), and, in the

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second, he projects the world as a vast network of graves. We know from the Raupach poem that "dimple" can carry this charge ("As they passed, the common wild / Like a murderous jester smiled, / Dimpled twice with nettly graves"—p. 95), and against those metaphoric dimples he opposes real depressions in a cheek ("Love only in the cheek"). A wobble is caused by the carnal, transient nature of the love in question, which has nothing to do with Platonic stars and can't properly be read as absolute Love with a capital L. A dimple that depends for its existence on the flesh is doomed to enter the grave, and the apparently triumphal counter-claim with which the poem climaxes, as sonnets are required to do, accordingly develops a somewhat hollow ring.

CHAPTER NINE POEMS FROM THE LATER VERSIONS OF DEATH’S JEST-BOOK AND OTHER POEMS, 1829-44

Although Donner's omnium gatherum title for this chapter suggests an emphasis on self-contained lyrics, the blank verse of the first ("Doomsday"), and the vestigial dramatic tissue clinging to it ("'What's o' clock?'— / It wants a quarter to twelve, / And to-morrow's doomsday.'1) implies that we are dealing with a monologue from a play. Beddoes's failure as a dramatist can be attributed to his defective stagecraft, the absence from his plays of plot momentum and character development. Given his tendency to linger when he ought to be picking up speed, this excision (if such it be) would certainly have made for a leaner text. But, while a notional benefit might have accrued to the work in question, the offcut can function as a fantastical poem in its own right. Its perspectives on time and space have their roots in Milton, and also derive more immediately from the paintings of the John Martin, "a man of . . . radical political opinions who on the one hand specialised in the production of apocalyptic visions of ruined urban worlds and on the other created schemes for urban development."2 The Brontës also drew sustenance from his pictures, for the "character of Martin's paintings, representing vast perspectives of the lost cities of the ancient world—Babylon, Nineveh, the Cities of the Plain, Pompeii, seen in the apocalyptic hour of their destruction—satisfied and corresponded to a craving for the grandiose"3 in the Haworth parsonage. Beddoes's mage-like speaker enjoys a sublime—a Martinesque— vantage on the spectacle he is about to unleash, one that puts him beyond "the flaming bounds of place and time."4 One also hears an echo of Prospero in his wide-ranging invocation ("Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves; / And ye that on the sands with printless foot / Do chase the ebbing Neptune"—The Tempest 5.1.34-36 ff.):

Poems from the Later Versions of Death’s Jest-Book and Other Poems Ye battle fields, and woody mountain sides, Ye lakes and oceans, and ye lava floods That have o'erwhelmed great cities, now roll back!

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(p. 106)

The plot out of which the monologue emerges seems to have turned on the speaker's being granted the power to effect a resurrection, which he multiplies ad infinitum by resurrecting the day of resurrection, a strategy akin to that of the Carthaginians, who were allowed to build a city within the compass of an ox skin, but evaded that stricture by cutting the hide into fine threads. The mage raises not a single ghost, but rather the mechanism for resurrection itself, enabling Beddoes to ring changes on the imagery of the "Dies Irae," with its vast herding of the dead ("Tuba mirum spargens sonum / Per sepulchra regionum / Coget omnes ante thronum" [Hark! the angel trumpet sounding, / Through sepulchral realms rebounding. / See the dead the throne surrounding.]5: If I can raise one ghost, why I will raise And call up doomsday from behind the east. Awake then, ghostly doomsday! Throw up your monuments, ye buried men That lie in ruined cities of the wastes!

"Throw up" is often applied to the erection of buildings, but here it ironically describes their overthrow. Beddoes out-Martins Martin by populating every inch of the globe with pullulating figures, like an apple rife with maggots. Natural catastrophes that issued in wholesale loss of life now find themselves outnumbered by their victims, and, whereas they had once been agents of engulfment, themselves recede before that inexorable tide ("now roll back!"). In the universal confusion, the borderline between art and nature becomes blurred, as in the parallel often drawn between forest glades and gothic arcades: Along the Church's central space The sacred weeks, with unfelt pace, Have borne us on from grace to grace. As travellers on some woodland height, When wintry suns are gleaming bright, Lose in arch'd glades their tangled sight;6

Beddoes, however, rings a change on that topos, scrambling woodland and temple in alternate phrases not because the one resembles the other, but

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rather because the seismic uprushing of all the dead issues in a universal blur: An earthquake of the buried shake the domes Of arched cathedrals, and o'erturn the forests, Until the grassy mounds and sculptured floors, The monumental statues, hollow rocks, The paved churchyard, and the flowery mead, The ocean's billowy sarcophagi, Pass from the bosoms of the rising people Like clouds! . . .

The domes of the southern church design get jumbled with the gothic arches of the north, and the latter's clustered shafts can't be distinguished from the tree trunks that the mass resurrection "o'erturns." "O'erturns" has strong revolutionary overtones, for the resurrection becomes a massive act of redress. Beddoes destroys with an undifferentiated chaos the architectural apartheid of Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"— its external graves for villagers ("Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap"7) and internal monuments for squires ("Where through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault", p. 124)—figuring the churchyard as a paved space, and warping church floors, ordinarily twodimensional, into three-dimensional sculptures like the "hollow rocks" that paraphrase them. Alternating nature and nurture in antithetic phrases, he reaches the point where the one entity dissolves into the other, and the whole planet vanishes behind the exhalation of its seas: "ocean's billowy sarcophagi, Pass from the bosoms of that rising people / Like clouds!" This recalls, but wholly reconceives, Prospero's vision in The Tempest 4.1.152-56: The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. . . .

Autocracy's folies de grandeur, which have issued in the deaths of countless slaves, find themselves reversed when the men who built monuments turn into spade-skeletons and dig up the tyrants they were forced to memorialize. A trimeter prises open the palatial floors, and creates a metrical chasm that yawns and then disgorges the bodies casually shovelled into their foundations:

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. . . And first yawn deep Ye marble palace-floors, And let the uncoffined bones, which ye conceal, Ascend, and dig their purple murderers up, Out of their crowned death.

(Perhaps Hardy remembered the indifference of the powerful to the suffering they cause when he re-used "uncoffined" in "Drummer Hodge": "They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest / Uncoffined—just as found."8) Given the religious intolerance of the "purple murderers" (Nero comes to mind), Beddoes was no doubt prompted to think of the catacombs, while the idea of inmates' being brought into the light might have had its origin in Fidelio: "Oh welche Lust in freier Luft / den Atem leicht zu heben" [Oh, what joy to breathe / in the free air].9 The martyric sands of the Colosseum blend with the sands of the desert, Biblical trope of immensity ("I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore"—Gen. 23.17), each granule matched with a corresponding soul. Their nakedness points to the perfunctory burial rites (if any) accorded to their bodies, and refers us back once again to ideas of oppression and poverty (one thinks of the "poor naked wretches" of King Lear 3.4.28, also victims of social injustice): . . . Ye catacombs Open your gates, and overwhelm the sands With an eruption of the naked millions, Out of old centuries.

An echo of Psalm 24.7—"Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in"—creates an expectation of hieratic pageantry, and then overturns it in the unceremonious crowding of the dispossessed. Ships become air-borne to parody the lodging of the ark on Ararat, and apparently solid mountains become as vacant as Easter eggs: . . . The buried navies Shall hear the call, and shoot up from the sea Whose wrecks shall knock against the hollow mountains And wake the swallowed cities in their hearts. Forgotten armies rattle with their spears Against the rocky walls of their sepulchres; And earthquake of the buried shakes the pillars Of the thick-sown cathedrals; guilty forests, Where bloody spades have dug 'mid nightly storms; The muddy drowning-places of the babes;

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Beddoes uses shifts in mood and tense to create a stylized incoherence. First we have an imperative incantation to reverse the forces of destruction—"now roll back!"—and then jussive subjunctives ("and let the uncoffined bones"); then another trenchant imperative ("Ye catacombs / Open your gates"), and then the future indicative, for now an irreversible process has begun ("The buried navies / Shall hear the call"). Finally, to confirm that irreversibility, the present indicative records events transpiring before our very eyes: "An earthquake of the buried shakes the pillars." Notice how, if it weren't for the semi-colon, "guilty forests" and "thick-sown cathedrals" would stand in apposition to each other, recapitulating the earlier juxtaposition of "arched cathedrals" and "forests," and again driving home an apocalyptic elision of nature and nurture. The "bloody spades" that dig the forest graves could as easily be interring the bodies of church functionaries with the blood of thousands on their hands (Dominic and Torquemada come to mind), and "the muddy drowningplaces of the babes" bitterly paraphrase the baptismal rite as later in Yeats's own version of apocalypse: "The ceremony of innocence is drowned."10 The poem then slips into incoherence and talks about "pyramids, and bony hiding places" as if these topics had never been broached before, clear evidence that we are dealing with only the roughest of drafts. Beddoes now weaves a new voice into the texture, and uses quotation marks to signalize the fact. It seems to epitomize humankind in general, a graspable embodiment of the uncountable hordes of resurrectees. The plea of this compound familiar sinner centres on a rainbow, emblem of cooperation ("I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth"—Gen. 9.13). This conveys a yearning to re-establish contact with the world: 'Thou rainbow on the tearful lash of doomsday's morning star Rise quick, and let me gaze into that planet deep and far, As into a loved eye; Or I must, like the fiery child of the Vesuvian womb, Burst with my flickering ghost abroad, before the sun of doom Rolls up the spectre sky.' (p. 107)

Beddoes hints at erotic deprivation here, for the speaker, celibate from all eternity, wishes to snatch a brief dalliance from the jaws of extinction. "Rise" has a phallic charge, "quick" activates the Anglo-Saxon sense of "vital," and the planet Venus, vector of sensuality, presides over the

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whole. Orgasm and birth accordingly fuse in a volcanic outburst that also develops a third identity as parturition. Beddoes clearly stopped at that point, or a German "person from Porlock" knocked on his study door. The "Song" that follows marks a fresh approach to the same material, the singer now become the mage who spoke the text of "Doomsday." Not only does he compress his invocation into rhyming hexameters, heptameters and trimeters but he also rephrases the invocation of the compound familiar sinner, so that the two personae bleed into each other. The poem parodies the cletic invocations of Whitsunday—"Veni, Creator Spiritus, / Mentes tuorum visita, / Imple superna gratia"11 [Come, O Creator Spirit, come, / And make within our hearts thy home; / To us thy grace celestial give12]—and of Advent—"Veni, veni, Emmanuel" [O come, O come, Emmanuel]13—paradoxically turning salvation into destruction: "Oh doomsday, doomsday come! thou creative morn / Of graves in earth, and under sea." The "tuba mirum spargens sonum" of the "Dies Irae" becomes a cornucopia, and the single angel of doomsday (Uriel according to the myth) multiplies into a heavenly host, figured by a taut oxymoron ("fair and dread") that looks head to the "terrible beauty" of "Easter 1916" (Yeats, p. 205): [']. . . all teeming at the horn Of angels fair and dread. As thou the ghosts shalt waken, so I, the ghost, wake thee; For thy rising sun and I shall rise together from the sea, The eldest of the dead.'

The eldest of the dead ought logically to be Adam, but Beddoes has revised the myth and compressed into that representative man every crime committed by humankind. Just as Shelley had conflated Jesus and Cain as twinned embodiments of the outcast ("made bare his branded and ensanguined brow, / Which was like Cain's or Christ's"14), so his successor, with a definite article that renders the ghost absolute ("I, the ghost"), hints at the third person of the Trinity. Its ability to stride "o'er the billowy main" likewise alludes to one of Jesus' definitive powers. Given the marine origin of this mysterious figure, and the association of its disclosure with the "Dies Irae," one can invoke Tennyson's "Kraken" (1830) by way of comparison: There hath he lain for ages and will lie Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep, Until the latter fire shall heat the deep; Then once by man and angels to be seen, In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.15

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The phrase "billowy main" occurs twice within the space of three lines, pointing once again to the inchoate state of the draft. Beddoes tidied up and condensed the same material into "The Old Ghost" (p. 108), a ghost that lacks the portentous all-inclusiveness of its earlier avatars. This figures more as an eidolon of the poet himself, as conscious of his own "damnation" as the speaker in the Clifton album confessional. His marine burial seems to have disqualified him from resurrection because, unlocated and unvisited, his grave can't attract mourners to prove that once he was the subject of a reciprocal love. The "broken heart" of the tomb in which he was never interred explains how the flower found purchase in the crumbled stone, but also functions as an emblem for the "broken heart" of the mourner who might have planted it, had she (recte he) had the opportunity: None has wept upon its stone, And ne'er a flower has grown Out of its broken heart to prove How in life it abounded with longings of sweet love. (p. 108)

As the ghost of body that "has mouldered long ages away in the sea," the speaker forfeits his full human corporeality—a submerged metaphor, perhaps, for Beddoes's not having had the courage to act upon his attraction to other men. The remedy for this lovelessness would lie in just such an erotic advance as the poem describes, as Coleridge's ancient mariner finds redemption through empathy: A spring of love gushed from my heart, And I blessed them unaware: Sure my kind saint took pity on me, And I blessed them unaware.16

By having the ghost contemplate erotically "the maid that lay so young / 'Mong weeds and toadstools hoary," Beddoes projects innocence in the midst of corruption, a chasm of age separating him from the young object of his affection. (Could this reflect a comparable infatuation in the twilight of the poet's life, an attempt to recapture the idyll with Reich, if such an idyll occurred?) By way of Verfremungseffekt, the winds "sing their satire" à la "The Merchant's Tale": "['] Oold fissh and yong flessh wolde I have ful fain. / Bet is,' quod he, 'a pyk than a pykerel, / And bet than old boef is the tendre veel[']".17 Old age should renounce the lust of the flesh, or run the risk of mockery such as Crabbe unleashes on decrepit embraces: "Tottering they came, and toying (odious scene!)".18 But Beddoes adds a

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sterner note of judgement in "wickedly." Can the old ghost be contemplating rape? If so, no wonder that its yearning for redemption should die an arid death. Notwithstanding the oceanic tracts of saltness around him, he has been unable to "wring from his eyes in the sea / One little tear to shed / In love above the dead." The compressed version of the poem suppresses this hint of contemplated violence, achieving a greater pathos, which Beddoes further enhances by having the shark, emblem of pitilessness, sneer at his stillborn desire. The "Song by Siegfried" confesses a secret love, not to the object of desire, but simply as a therapeutic act of writing. Its situation recalls Viola's narrative in Twelfth Night 2.4.111-13—"She never told her love, / But let concealment like a worm i' th' bud / Feed on her damask cheek"— though it could just as well have had an autobiographical source, the undeclarable nature of Beddoes's affection (for Reich, perhaps, or for another student at Göttingen), the "love that dare not speak its name."19 He has only to transpose genders for his secret to remain intact, and can further ironize the hopelessness of the situation by reproaching an actually blameless person for being unconsciously blameworthy: Lady, was it fair of thee To seem so passing fair to me? Not every star to every eye Is fair; and why Art thou another's share?

The opening lines rely on the trope of antistasis, which repeats the same word with different meanings, the first "fair" relating to justice and the second to beauty. Since the lady has done nothing but exist, she hardly deserves reproach, and this the speaker well knows, his unspoken (though written) lyric simply presented as the correlate of an undeclared (because unmentionable) love. Some erotic improperia level their reproaches on reasonable grounds (Suckling's "Why so pale and wan, fond lover"20), but others don't. Donne, for example, pretends to belabour the object of his (illicit) affection for remaining faithful to her spouse in "The Blossom" whereas he ought by rights to be rebuking himself for an adulterous passion: And think'st by hovering here to get a part In a forbidden or forbidding tree, And hop'st her stiffness by long siege to bow:21

Just as "The Blossom" "unintentionally" indicts the speaker rather than the woman under siege, so does the "Song by Siegfried." Because Beddoes

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has reined in his habitual verbal exuberance, it presents itself as a remarkably chaste lyric, its lexical restraint enhanced by a stanzaic corset that shapes it into constricted periods, forcing the rhymes to jump at each other when the lines contract. The effect resembles a suppressed sob—as when the tetrameter suddenly snaps into a dimeter knobble (like the rapid self-enfurlment of a sea-anemone) and forces the rhymes into premature synchrony: "Not every star to every eye / Is fair; and why." One admires this sustention of a complex stanza over the course of the poem, for instead of providing a straitjacket, it forces the verse to rise to the challenge, and gives a leanness to its expression instead of forcing it off course by the exigencies of its rhyme scheme (as can sometimes happen). The second strophe heightens the injustice of the arraignment by blaming the woman not only for her innocent beauty but for her promiscuous good nature. Pope's Belinda measures out her amiableness with shrewd selfinterest—"Favours to none, to all she Smiles extends, / Oft she rejects, but never once offends"22—but this beloved can hardly be accused of comparable manipulativeness. Siegfried tries, even so, recreate her in the image of a conventional flirt. The verb "fly" suggests the launching of arrows Cupid-style, but because they remain undirected and general, the blame shifts from the ostensible to the actual culprit, viz, the person who unreasonably vents his distress: "Not every lip to every eye / Should let smiles fly." He confesses to erotic fantasies in which the beloved joins him in bed, masking her identity with an allegorizing capital, and unwittingly displacing triumphal bays with an emblem of mourning (cf. "The fresh streams ran by her, and murmur'd her moans, / Sing willow, willow, willow"—Othello 4.3.44-45). In the penultimate line, a coloned caesura dramatizes the fate of the two figures, hermetically sealed from each other and leading uncontiguous lives that nonetheless have an undisclosed connection: "Smile on: but never know, / I die, nor of what woe. "Dream Pedlary" (p. 110), Beddoes's most celebrated lyric, takes as its starting point the vending poems of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. "Fine knacks for ladies, cheap, choice, brave and new! / Good pennyworths,—but money cannot move"23 comes to mind, and so too does Autolycus' inventory in The Winter's Tale 4.4.220-21 ("Lawn white as driven snow, / Cypress black as e'er was crow, / Gloves as sweet as damask roses"), not to mention Campion's "There is a garden in her face" ("cherries grow which none may buy / Till 'cherry-ripe' themselves do cry"24). The lyric has a clear argumentative structure, for which the form seldom makes provision, its stanzas more usually self-contained envelopes that could be disposed in almost any sequence without altering its overall

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meaning. By contrast, Beddoes here assigns a protasis to the first stanza, an answering apodosis to the second, and in the third revokes the last with an adversative conjunction to introduce a new premise in turn. This the fourth expands upon, leading to the conclusion set out in the fifth. An additional sense of logical progression arises from what might be called "argumentative anadiplosis," the second stanza ending "This would I buy," and the third beginning "But there were dreams to sell." In the latter, the line "Is wishing ghosts to rise" becomes an Adam's rib carried into the fourth as "If there are ghosts to raise." That in turn ends with "Vain is the call," and allows the first line of the fifth to develop out of it as "Know'st thou not ghosts to sue." We assume at first that Beddoes is addressing us, but soon realize that the poem resembles the Metaphysical debate, two contending stances (in this case the wistful yearner and the hard-eyed realist) trying to establish dominance in the manner of the competing voices that we encounter in Marvell's "Dialogue, between the Resolved Soul, and Created Pleasure": Soul I sup above, and cannot stay To bait so long upon the way. Pleasure On these downy Pillows lye, Whose soft Plumes will thither flye:25

With the same kind of blandishment as Marvell's Pleasure, Beddoes's voice of longing sets up a fantastical hypothesis—that of purchasable dreams—and momentarily blocks out the voice of reason: If there were dreams to sell, What would you buy? Some cost a passing bell; Some a light sigh, That shakes from Life's fresh crown Only a roseleaf down. If there were dreams to sell, Merry and sad to tell, And the crier rung the bell, What would you buy?

The prices for the inventory range from the minor melancholy of a "light sigh" to death itself, announced by the same "passing bell" that we find in

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Herbert's "Flower": "bringing down to hell / And up to heaven in an houre; / Making a chiming of a passing-bell."26 Central to the poem's allegorical framework is the idea of "Life's fresh crown," conceived as a wreath placed out of reach in a game of skill that requires contestants to dislodge it in order to win a prize. The leaves of this coronal are both the dreams themselves and exchangeable tokens for the purchase of the dreams (as so often, Beddoes doesn't construct his allegory with any degree of precision). The more intense the investment of sorrow, the more attractive the dream it buys, or that would seem to be the reason for correlating a light sigh (hardly the signature of Angst) with a mere rose petal. One imagines that death itself (the "passing bell") would buy the entire wreath—the right to choose what dreams one will. This coronal, initially vegetable, morphs into jewelled diadem in the second stanza, for there it's made to yield a pearl (a much heavier sigh, one imagines, now the going price): .

A cottage lone and still, With bowers nigh, Shadowy, my woes to still, Until I die. Such pearl from Life's fresh crown Fain would I shake me down. Were dreams to have at will, This would best heal my ill, This would I buy.

As if to demonstrate the meek circumscription of the poet's beau idéal, the stanza forfeits a line, and so loses some momentum in what would otherwise have been an inexorable triplet. While we have the stanza-form in focus, we can observe that its finely wrought design (3a2b3a2b3c3c3d3d3d2b) resembles a hymn by J Marriott—"Thou, whose almighty word / Chaos and darkness heard"—which also has an irremissive trimeter triplet and a terminal rhyme that hooks up with an earlier one to create a sense of anchorage: "Hear us, we humbly pray, / And where the Gospel-day / Sheds not its glorious ray, / Let there be light."27 Although one can scarcely imagine Beddoes's having encountered it in The Evangelical Magazine (where it received posthumous publication in 182528), it's not beyond the realm of possibility that somebody such as Vincent Novello (who had undergone a religious conversion) circulated it among London literati, Procter among them, and that he in turn might have sent it to Beddoes in Germany. It's more probable, however, that this is simply a case of convergent evolution.

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Beddoes's yearning for retreat into a cottage-hermitage looks back to Pomfret's Choice and forward to Yeats's "Lake Isle of Innisfree," but his thirst for retirement seems to be a function of a grief (like the sequestered stag's in As You Like It) rather than a desire for solitude as something good in itself. It has more in common with the pastoral banishment in Measure for Measure—"There at the moated grange resides this dejected Marianna" (3.1.265)—and with the unexpectedly desolate conclusion of Pope's "Ode on Solitude": "Thus unlamented let me dye; / Steal from the world, and not a stone / Tell where I lye" (p. 265). Behind all these poems, of course, lies the fons et origoof all eremitic discourse, Psalm 55: 6 And I said, Oh that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away, and be at rest. 7 Lo, then would I wander far off, and remain in the wilderness.

The adjective "shadowy" drifts appositively between "cottage" and "bowers" so that they blur into each other, creating a penumbral atmosphere like that in "Eloisa to Abelard"—"In these deep solitudes and awful cells, / Where heav'nly pensive, contemplation dwells" (Pope, p. 252). This points to the fact that, as in the case of Eloisa, Beddoes's retirement will still erotic woes, woes possibly related to unrequital but more probably to bereavement. He amplifies the subfusc note through the tautological rhyme of "still" and "still," a word that retains both its aural and kinetic meanings. The stilling of woes, while it primarily relates to quieting the convulsion of love pangs, also carries a sense of quieting the cries of anguish that they cause. Beddoes signals the "false" resolution of the argument by having anaphora confidently drive home the choice of retirement, the double deictic ("This would best heal my ill, / This I would buy"), reminiscent of customers who decisively point to an item that they have decided to purchase. The dreams of "Dream-Pedlary" register initially as beaux idéals, of schemes for a life better than the one we live, but the third stanza redefines them as oneiric visions, chimeras no different from the untrustworthy nature of sense experience sub specie Platonis—except that Beddoes gives the parable of the cave an unPlatonic twist. Instead of proclaiming a radiant Pauline éclaircissement beyond the grave ("For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known"—1 Cor. 13.12)—or imaging death as a posthumous sleep ("For in that sleep of death what dreams may come"—Hamlet 3.1.66), he leads us from life's spectral uncertainty into the certitude of nothingness: "Life is a dream, they tell, / Waking, to die." No point in peddling dreams, then, if one simply exchanges an old

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unreality for a new. To dream in this sense is to believe in the immortality of the soul, "rise" summoning a spectre by enchantment and also securing a permanent and actual resurrection: Dreaming a dream to prize, Is wishing ghosts to rise; And, if I had the spell To call the buried, well, Which one would I?

In a haunting moment of candour, Beddoes discloses the reason for the misery that has settled upon him, Donner having suggested that the "loved longlost boy" of stanza four is Bernard Reich.29 The youthfulness of the beloved, the extensive span of the bereavement, and the talk of necromantic "raising" all suggest that Reich died an early death, and the very fact that he simply vanishes from the letters suggests that the loss was so momentous that Beddoes couldn't bring himself to write about it in the rawness of his grief. The stanza ends with the harsh truism "Out of death lead no ways," paraphrasing the "undiscover'd country, from whose bourne / No traveller returns" (Hamlet 3.1.79-80), and rendering it even more desolate. By negating the road rather than the traveller, Beddoes denies us even that phantasmal presence in his unpopulated landscape ("you cannot employ the English language" to deny an object "without our glimpsing—through the interstices of the negative"30—the object denied). All he offers is an uncharacterized space, inaccessible and self-enclosed, a proto-Satrean huis-clos. The last strophe recalls the condescending split-self conversation of Donne's "Blossom," in which the jaded mind attempts to wean the heart from a naive infatuation—"Little think'st thou, poor heart / That labourest yet to nestle thee" (p. 44). It also brings to mind the rueful self-analysis at the end of Gray's "Ode on the Spring" (after of his dismissal of the pleasure-seeking world), which also offers a crypto-homosexual explanation of the speaker's solitude: Poor moralist! and what art thou? A solitary fly! Thy joys no glittering female meets, No hive has thou of hoarded sweets,

(p. 53)

The same sobriety and desolation inform the anagnorisis of "DreamPedlary":

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Know'st thou not ghosts to sue? No love thou hast. Else lie, as I will do, And breathe thy last. So out of Life's fresh crown Fall like a rose-leaf down. Thus are the ghosts to woo; Thus are all dreams made true, Ever to last!

In the exuberant verse epistle about the rationale of Death's Jest-Book, Beddoes had planned bravely to outface death; now, in the manner of Hezekiah, he turns "his face to the wall" (Isa. 38.2)—committing suicide, as it were, by force of will. The two tense levels, the future employed by the rational voice that edits the poem, and the present by the wistful dreamer that it arraigns, now arrive at a point of contiguity while still remaining dissonant. The persistent freshness of "Life's crown" is now less a guerdon than the image of an endless cycle, the individual petals of existence perpetually falling and being replaced by others. Whereas in the first two stanzas Beddoes had projected the idea of anxious aspiration, of reaching up for the unreachable and managing a partial dislodgement instead of full seizure, he now finds himself a part of what he had been trying to achieve, and prepares to fall passively into oblivion. The hyperbatic separation of the adverb "down" from the verb "shake," hitherto an image of the delay between effort and reward ("That shakes from Life's fresh crown / Only a roseleaf down"), now conveys effortlessness, since the unfamiliar placement of the adverb almost allows it commute into down (breast plumage), cushioning the fall of death in a way that makes it attractive (one thinks of Beddoes's later poem, "The Phantom Wooer"). In surrendering life, one necessarily surrenders its futile aspirations, arriving at the only authentic and demonstrable posthumous reality, that of eternal non-being: "Thus are all dreams made true, / Ever to last." "Mandrake's Song" is so impenetrable and mystifying that it almost defies construction. While a general Erasmian (or Popian) tenor (the triumph of folly) is apparent, many specific details remain inscrutable. For example, if Mankind be banished from the world, what can remain for folly to practise upon? Is that world a space within doors, and, if so, what lies outside it? Interplanetary space? The structure collapses like a badly assembled scaffold if you interrogate it too closely:

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While Jove might seem to represent omnipotence, Homer makes it clear that even he remains subject to ananke, and, that being so, Fate can't logically have been his jester. Or perhaps Beddoes has resorted to such Jacobean "euphemisms" for God that, in deference to King James's piety, made Shakespeare write "Jove and my stars be praised!" in Twelfth Night 2.5.173-74. If so, Harlequin's motley could refer to the piebald nature of fallen humanity and Fate to the randomness of predestination, and one could force the poem into semblant coherence by equating ostentatious public virtue with Folly. Puritanism had advocated the closure of theatres and taverns in Elizabethan times, an impracticable and intolerant idealism that amounts to foolishness. An allusion to Jaques's speech about human futility in As You Like It 2.7.139 ff.—"All the world's a stage"—suggests that the loss of the theatre is the loss of a moral resource. Banish plays, and you banish Jaques, archetypal scourge of folly. Although Folly doesn't feature among the demi-goddesses invoked in "L'Allegro," she would surely have found herself more at home with "Jest and youthful Jollity, / Quips and Cranks, and wanton Wiles"31 than in Puritan conventicles. Here, in the worst Malvolio manner, however, she puts an end to laughter, prompting the a plangent oxymoron that links weeping and joy— "Weep all, for all, who laughed for you"—and which laments the exiled purveyors of satire and comedy, the guarantors of social health. The cryptic reference to goose grass is perhaps explained by reference to Grigson. He lists three plant species with that common name, the most likely (for our purposes) being Galium aparine, also known as "Cleavers" and "Hayriff," which attaches itself to passers-by and so spreads itself abroad: '"Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife': the weed, the hedge plant, the plant of thickets, which cleaves stem, leaves, fruit, to the passer-by. Certainly a goose plant, eaten by geese, and chopped and given to goslings."32 Given the currency of this name in Beddoes's native Gloucestershire, we should take this seriously, though the image might also have a medical dimension, presenting the grass as a cure for goosedom (folly by another name). The owl, both the bird of the night and of the goddess of wisdom, offers a mixed signal but the anti-religious tone (in respect of conventional piety's displacing a lust for life), implies that Beddoes knew, as Bosch had known, that "owls have sinister significance, and embody precise allusions to either heresy or magical-alchemical forces."33 Failing that, he would definitely have been aware that they figure dullness in The Dunciad—

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"And lo! her bird, (a monster of a fowl, / Something betwixt a Heideggre and owl,)" (Pope, p. 733). He magnifies their eyes (properly amber) into a universal, claustrophobic brown that engulfs the sky and displaces its blue (the traditional colour of truth) with something dun (and probably excremental): "But the owl's brown eye's the sky's new blue." Such magnification would accord with Pope's "monster of a fowl," and it finds itself enhanced by an internal rhyme that renders the same displacement in phonetic terms. The possessive apostrophe threatens to muddle itself with elliptical apostrophes that come in its wake, and further confusion arises from the use of "new", which properly applies to the novel brownness of the sky (hitherto blue), but which still attaches itself to the old colour, redefining it as a space rather than a chrome. Language can't function properly in that intellectual impasse, and breaks down into inscrutable expletives ("Heigho! Foolscap!"), the first possibly a stylized sigh of resignation (as in Much Ado About Nothing 2.1.300-01—"I may sit in a corner and cry 'Heigh-ho for a husband!'"), and the second a reminder that the victims of religious intolerance (cf. Goya's Court of the Inquisition34) were forced to wear long conical caps. "The New Cecilia" is a pastiche approximation to the bawdry of the fabliau— bawdry that, like that of its mediaeval originals, centres on the misuse of private parts. One remembers the posterior/face in "The Miller's Tale"—"And Absolon, hym fil no bet ne wers, / But with his mouth he kiste hir naked ers / Full savourly" (Chaucer, p. 53)—and also the posterior that mistakes Puck for a seat in A Midsummer Night's Dream 2.1.53—"Sometime for a three-foot stool mistaketh me; / Then slip I from her bum, down topples she"—not to mention Pope's "Chaucer", also an exercise, like Beddoes's, in pastiche mediaevalism. There a quacking duck emerges from a codpiece and prompts the cautionary maxim: "Bette is to pyne on Coals and Chalke, / Than trust on Mon, whose yerde can talke" (p. 10). Beddoes's satire also targets the grotesqueries of mediaeval hagiography, and begins by demystifying the wholly unmystic marriage of a factitious Saint Gingo, whose name, if one pronounce it with a voiced affricate, evokes the spice that Sir Toby flings in the face of Malvolio ("and ginger shall be hot i' th' mouth too"— Twelfth Night 2.3.116). At the same time, however, it does sound like several authentic saint names ending in O (Ivo, Bruno, Diego). Moreover, if Beddoes's thoughts were turning to Switzerland at this point, he might well have encountered the town of St Gingolph in the course of consulting an atlas. Whereas the generality of saints lead austere and celibate lives, this Gingo takes up with a drunken gypsy:

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Beddoes has devised a stanza that comes close to anticipating the limerick's, lacking only the third dimeter in the systole of that form. Its pattern of internal contraction and self-righting expansion serves the content well. Ordinarily, the Roman church begins the process of canonization if the projected saint appear to answer prayers, rumours of such sanctity often having their origin in mass hysteria. Something of this sort lies behind the elevation of St Gingo. However, as Matt. 13.57 informs us, a "prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own house," and his widow withholds the glory that others have accorded him. Beddoes conscripts his rhymes to this satiric end, airily meeting the challenge extended by "Gingo" with a nonce nickname and then with a euphemism for profanity: "The wonders he did do / Th' incredulous widow / Denied with unladylike lingo." The anti-hagiographic impulses don't stop there. Many mediaeval legends of sainthood claim adunata as facts in an attempt to confound the sceptical. For example, in the "miracle" of Bolsena, recorded in a fresco by Raphael, a disbeliever in transubstantiation finds the host bleeding in his mouth, while Tannhäuser learns that "it was as impossible that he should be absolved as that the Pope's barren staff should flower,"35 only to find that it "has miraculously burst" (p. 219) into bloom. Just such an adunaton supplies the comic mechanism for Beddoes's ballad, the gipsy claiming that her husband is as likely to qualify for sainthood as her anus to function as a musical instrument. This cues the satiric side-swipe at Cecilia, patron saint of music, and the subject of baroque cantatas and odes written, inter alios, by Dryden and Pope. Such grandiose precedents (evoked and collapsed by the title, "The New Cecilia") intensify the farcicality of the poem, which is as unlike a cantata as it is possible to be. The Cecilia of legend was a principled patrician, Beddoes's an alcoholic peasant: As she said it, her breakfast beginning on A tankard of home-brewed inviting ale, Lo! the part she was sitting and sinning on Struck the old hundreth up like a nightingale.

Beddoes here crosses sectarian lines, the "old hundreth," being a chorale melody from the Genevan Psalter (1551) taken up by the Anglican church

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as "All People That on Earth Do Dwell."36 Congregational hymns, moreover, are much more a feature of Protestant than Catholic practice, a confusion that serves only to sharpen the comedy. Laughter often originates in the yoking of heterogeneous ideas by violence together, especially when that which passes out of the woman (melody) bears no relation to that which enters her mouth. Since some shameless people lift their bottoms the more comfortably to pass wind (a habit sent up in the film Blazing Saddles), the hyperbatic placement of "up" in "Struck the old hundreth up" has a kinaesthetic hint of such a raising. At the same time, the comic peristasis in The Rape of the Lock—"And Screams of Horror rend th' affrighted Skies. / Not louder Shrieks to pitying Heav'n are cast, / When Husbands or when Lap-dogs breathe their last" (Pope, p. 231)— finds an echo in the comparisons heaped up to measure the volume of the sound: Loud as psophia in an American forest or The mystic Memnonian marble in A desart at daybreak, that chorister Breathed forth his Aeolian warbling.

Psophia leucoptera, the Pale-Winged Trumpeter of South America, has a reputation for noisiness, the males of forming groups that utter "prolonged booming calls with black feathers raised, bill opening and closing."37 Beddoes had probably encountered the creatures in the course of his zoological studies, and drew a parallel between the opening and closing of the widow's sphincter and the bird's beak. The colossus of Amenhotep at Thebes, associated with Memnon through the sound it emitted each morning (construed as a salute to his mother, goddess of the dawn), strikes an obviously mock-heroic note, the statue having no more control over its involuntary noise, a function of its expanding substance, than the woman over the reverberations of her anus. Because of the involuntary nature of its "music," the colossus looked ahead to the Aeolian lyre, "an analogy for the poetic mind as well as a subject for poetic description,"38 which Romantic obsession allowed Beddoes to give a scatological turn the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings."39 The Aeolian mode is the ninth of Gleranus' Dodecachordon, and closely associated with Catholic music, while the harp's association with the Greek god of the winds further establishes the gustiness of the gipsy's guts. Beddoes inverts the mediaeval universe by redefining the woman's posterior as a solid sphere that supports the stars ("firmament" glances offstage at "fundament"), and produces a paronomastic play of angelic and fleshly worlds when that bottom becomes a "creature seraphic and

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spherical." Whereas Chaucer's Wife of Bath appropriates "By maistrie, al the soveraynetee,"40 Beddoes, with the mock-portentousness of a mediaeval cleric, reverses her power-grab, and tells wives to praise their husbands or suffer the gipsy's fate. He inserts a Parthian sting in "melt," a verb both of collapse and liquid ejection. "End" also functions in its anatomical and temporal senses, with, once again, an off-staged play on "melody" and "malady": Therefore, Ladies, repent and be sedulous In praising your lords, lest, ah! well a day! Such judgement befall the incredulous And your latter ends melt into melody.

The title of "The Oviparous Tailor," by imposing on a man a woman's capacity for childbirth, and by furthermore displacing mammalian by avine reproduction, produces a certain frisson even before the poem gets underway. Bosch had also exploited this sort of horror, his Garden of Earthly Delights full of claustrophobic oviform structures that both threaten and enclose its human figures. Mario Bussagli remarks that the alchemical egg on the head of one of the riders marks the focal point of the whole composition. Whether it signifies the indefinite, the embryonic—the asexual seed from which springs a universe to which the key is seen as sexual (since even plants and stones are envisaged as male and female)—or whether it signifies as an alchemical crucible, the fact remains the egg is a frankly heretical symbol so far as Catholicism is concerned. (Bosch, p. 27) However, the "heretical" status of alchemy would have interested rather than alarmed Beddoes, and the primary urge behind the melding of viviparous and oviparous biology is to suggest evolutionary regression, a regression emblematized by the infantile sound of a nursery rhyme: Wee, wee tailor, Nobody was paler Than wee, wee tailor; And nobody was thinner. Hast thou mutton-chops for dinner, My small-beer sinner, My starveling rat,—but haler,— Wee, wee tailor? (p. 113)

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In Southern varieties of English, "wee" has a superlative charge ("very small") as opposed to the more neutral smallness it signifies in Scots. That fact, and the obsessive way in which the epizeuxis thrums upon the tailor's tininess, reduces him to the point where he warrants comparison with a rat. The repetition also generates the chant of a children's game, as do the oddity of the rhymes and in the taunting posture of the speaker. Because of their confined, sedentary lifestyles, tailors were often the common-noun starvelings that Shakespeare turns into a proper noun in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and one hears a measure of playground spite in those mutton chops, since the subject is almost certainly a victim of malnutrition. But the adult in Beddoes also prompts a protective kinship with his creation not unlike that which Isbrand feels for Harpagus: "And Harpagus, he is my joy, / Because he wept not like a woman" (p. 89). Both of them use personal pronouns as a seal of endorsement: "My small-beer sinner, / My starveling rat." Since nursery verse lacks polish, Beddoes invests his poem with similarly lame and cumbersome rhymes. Short of one for "duck's bill" in the third stanza, he rewrites the idiom "run out of luck" as a metaphor of spillage ("luck spill") and then coins the nonsensical phrase ("muck's pill") where "muck" seems to function as a nonce synonym for "mountebank" when the tailor tries out remedies to ward off the spell. The same rhymedriven non-sequitur assigns the witch a parrot (given the preceding "garret"), instead of the more traditional cat, and vanishes without a trace when the hen comes into focus, the latter's stale eggs originating in the need to rhyme with "tailor," as does the eccentric comparative form of "male." Beddoes has enhanced the incantatory nature of the lyric through his insistent use of the tercet, redoubling its insistence by the narrow compass of trimeter lines. One can assume from the morphology of the first stanza that he intended to construct each of these triads from a single rhyme, but that the scheme foundered on the intractable nature of "tailor" in this respect. However, the pattern's relaxation in the subsequent strophes involves no loss of force, given the improvisatory quality of the whole. Children often drop their articles in the early stages of speech, and Beddoes imitates the habit by means of bare-bones stenography— "Wee, wee tailor, / Witch watched him like a jailor"—as Gilbert would later inUtopia Limited: Father rises, bows politely— Mother smiles (but not too brightly)— Doctor mumbles like a dumb thing— Nurse is busy mixing something.—41

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"The Oviparous Tailor" is proto-surrealist, but unlike Bosch and Grünewald, who, when dealing with the temptations of St Antony, had a hagiographical source to explain their bizarreries, and unlike Dali, whose grotesque combinations had a Freudian underpinning, Beddoes must fall back on wands and incantations to account for a chicken with a duck's bill, and a man who lays eggs. Instead of cackling to announce their appearance as hens usually do, the tailor crows like a cock, but in a way that establishes him (illogically—or alogically, since we have entered a proto-surrealist world) as being "maler" (an incogitable datum prompted solely by a need to rhyme). The broomstick confirms his Lilliputian stature, and also redraws the standard witchy prop as an innocuous perch, while the inkhorn term "gallinaceous," defamiliarizing an ordinary chicken, looks ahead to the polysyllabic humour of Dickens. Two puns in the last strophe—the "poach'd eggs" a nemesis for the tailor's poaching, and "Fowl-death," a trivialization of "foul death"—conclude this charming but babyish exercise in absurdity. The "Song from the Ship," by contrast, is verse the first order. A syntaktikon or departure poem, it has an operatic precedent in Meyerbeer's Crociato in Egitto, which Beddoes might well have seen in London.42 He conveys the elation of moving after a long, static wait, not least through the adverbial phrases that echo off each other at the start and finish of each stanza, and encase them with inclusio: To sea! To sea! the calm is o'er; The wanton water leaps in sport, And rattles down the pebbly shore; The dolphin wheels, the sea-cows snort, And unseen Mermaids' pearly song Comes bubbling up the weeds among. Fling broad the sail, dip deep the oar: To sea! to sea! the calm is o'er. (p. 114)

The energy and slancio of this fine stanza probably derive from the syntaktikon embedded in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"—"The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared, / Merrily did we drop / Below the kirk, below the hill"43—and also from Shelley's tactic in "Love's Philosophy," where natural phenomena inspire matching human ones: "The fountains mingle with the river / And the rivers with the Ocean, / The winds of Heaven mix for ever / With a sweet emotion."44 Beddoes has similarly connected a motile seascape with an equivalently restless crew. The submarine presence of mermaids, whose song bubbles through seaweed and enhances the mouvementé effect of the lyric, makes possible

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a memorable glimpse sotto in sù of the ship's shadow as it passes over a shaft of sunlight: To sea! To sea! our wide-winged bark Shall billowy cleave its sunny way, And with its shadow fleet and dark Break the caved Tritons' azure ray, Like mighty eagles soaring light O'er antelopes on Alpine height. The anchor heaves, the ship swings free, The sails swell full. To sea, to sea!

Having ended the former strophe with quasi-adverbial complements for the nouns that couple with them ("Fling broad"; "dip deep"), Beddoes repeats the pattern in "Shall billowy cleave," except that the covalence of the epithet suspends the sentence between two applications (the nominal form of "billow" signifies a "wave" and the verb an expansive play of fabric). The first connects with the sails that precede it, and the second with the waves that the ship creates as it cleaves the sea. Our sense of noise (splashing water, creaking ropes) is suddenly blocked by our arrival on the quiet ocean bed, everything we have just experienced at first hand turned into its silent Platonic shadow. Beddoes reinforces this effect through the intransitive use of "cave," sequestering the tritons from the world above—a wholly different but analogous world—and then superposing another analogous world upon that in turn, an aerial world in which eagles cast shadows on Alpine slopes. One could remark in passing that Hans Andersen later produced the same sense of convergent and divergent worlds in The Little Mermaid (1837): "a strangely beautiful blue was spread over the whole, so that one might have fancied oneself raised very high in the air, with the sky at once above and below—certainly not at the bottom of the sea".45) Beddoes effects a slight increase in the pace of the final reprise of "To sea, to sea," substituting a comma for the interruptive exclamation point. This lyric of fresh, vigorous motion is followed by an antithetical pendant that centres on becalmment. The first-person pronouns imply a continuation of the narrative, but they could just as easily be a phantom crew in a phantom boat such as we find in Wagner's Fliegende Holländer (1843), an opera that Beddoes might well have known. There can be no doubting that the poem inclines toward the bizarre and the macabre, unlike the healthful shanty that has gone before:

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Chapter Nine As mad sexton's bell, tolling For earth's loveliest daughter Night's dumbness breaks rolling Ghostlily: So our boat breaks the water Witchingly. As her look the dream troubles Of her tearful-eyed lover, So our sails in the bubbles Ghostlily Are mirrored, and hover Moonily. (p. 115)

Just as Edward Hopper hints at insoluble narrative contexts for his paintings, so Beddoes's "mad sexton" suggests a possible connection between his obsessive tolling and the woman he buries, the superlative degree of "loveliest" inviting us to construe it both in terms of Romance and romance. He might be a Hugolian Quasimodo yearning for his Esmeralda, and deranged by her death, or he might be a father, rendered mad, like Hugo's Triboulet, by the loss of a daughter's virginity. Sextons, unlike hatters, have no professional connection with madness, and one must assume that, whatever the source of the derangement, its signifié is an unrelenting use of the bell rope. Reflex supplants impulse as in the case of Dickens's elephants (as atypically metonyms of derangement as sextons), which convey the mindlessness of industrialism: "where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness."46 The implied narrative, whatever it may be, remains compacted inside the simile, creating an eerie atmosphere, but failing to evoke a picture of the ship itself as it ought to have done. Perhaps, even though the Renaissance context of Death's Jest-Book wouldn't have allowed its formal articulation, Beddoes had a tolling buoy in mind. However, he would almost certainly have drawn on "The Ancient Mariner," where a preternaturally quiet sea subsumes everything into its stasis: We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea. Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down, 'Twas sad as sad could be; (p. 190)

Compare "So our boat breaks the water / Witchingly," which is to say, in a way that the defies the laws of physics. Since we have no context to shape

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our reading, the poem functions as a Rorschach Blot. Is there any connection with the "Song, on the Water" discussed in the preceding chapter? We shall never know unless the vanished "Browning box" of Beddoes manuscripts were to come to light. As it is, everything about the poem conspires to mystify the reader. For example, hyperbaton inverts the object and the verb, and, if we were to insert a notional comma after "daughter," "breaks" could attach itself to "rolling" to compare dumbness with a fog. But on closer inspection, we find that the comma properly comes after "breaks," and that it is the bell’s sound, and not dumbness, that rolls forward in a ghostly manner—"ghostly" because a knell evokes mortality, but also "ghostly" because its echoes reduplicate "ghosts" of itself. What had been heady and resolute now dribbles to an uncertain close, the monometers of "Ghostlily," "Witchingly" and "Moonily" half aspiring to the condition of dimeters through their tremulous disyllabic rhymes. Adding to the sense of irresolution, the adjectival "y" suffix of "ghostly" echoically repeats itself to bring an adverb into being. The first-person plurals sit oddly with an arcane story involving a mad sexton, a dead woman, and her grieving lover. This is not the stuff from which similes ordinarily arise, for they remain too deeply rooted in their narrative to strike the right note of applicability. And how can a communal, choric voice access the dream of the "tearful-eyed lover"? Only an omniscient, god-like poet could properly exercise this prerogative. Contradictions such as these enhance the phantasmal quality of the poem, and all we can do is to submit to its mystery with admiring puzzlement. "The Warning," once again spoken by Tempest-like "Voices in the Air," recurs to the Beddovian idée fixe of resurrection. As usual, the poem hinges on a paradoxical tension that splits the simile from the object it attempts to illustrate: As sudden thunder Pierces night; As magic wonder, Wild affright, Rives asunder Men's delight: Our ghost, our corpse and we Rise to be. (p. 115)

The downward motion of lightning and the (implied) downward slash of riving are heightened by a curtal syntax that suppresses some of its conjunctions (a fact that in itself proves violently riving), while dimeters

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forge ahead with relentless force, tempered only by a solitary three-foot line. This enumerates two distinct entities ("ghost" and "corpse") and then fuses them into a compound identity with a plural pronoun. The unequal lineation of the couplet demonstrates the fusion of the body and soul (by force of sudden compacture, as it were), a fusion that death had reversed and resurrection restored. At the same time, "rise" moves in contrary motion against the netherward thrust of the two similes that illustrate the instantaneity of their fusion, as paradoxical in effect as having divisive similes illustrate the idea of elision. The second strophe inflects the "sic transit gloria mundi" topos with imagery culled from the gothic Romance: As flies the lizard, Serpent fell; As goblin vizard, At the spell Of pale wizard, Sinks to hell: Our life, our laugh, our lay Pass away.

It's uncertain whether the lizard in question be wriggling out of sight along a Mediterranean wall—"fly" in the sense of "fugere"—or whether tapinosis has reduced a winged dragon such as those that carried Medea from Corinth ("fly" in the sense of "volere"). Since most reptiles of this kind aren't grand enough to be called a "serpent fell," and since mythical dragons can't be termed Lacertidae, Beddoes places us, as so often, in a limbo of irreconcilable readings. He then takes us further into the world of romance, "vizard" here post-dating a sense recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary as having last been used in 1591, viz, a spectre. This phantasm has been summoned from the netherworld by a mage, and plunges back when his magic expires, reminding us of the ghosts that flee from an enchanter in the "Ode to the West Wind." Beddoes also overturns the Horatian boast "Exegi monumentum aere perennius" [I have finished a monument more lasting than bronze],47 when he includes a poetic "lay" in his list of ephemeral entities. The final stanza begins by opposing the brassy clarion of a bugle, pointed somewhat upward by the player, against the pendent droop of a snowdrop, the first the traditional emblem of the "dies irae," the second a topos of mortality and transience, for, notwithstanding the bravery with which it rises through the hostile snow, it has no more substance ("like a sprite") than the "goblin vizard" engulfed in the fires of hell:

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As wake the morning Trumpets bright; As snowdrop, scorning Winter's might, Rises warning Like a sprite, We buried, dead, and slain Rise again.

The inverted syntax creates a telling ambiguity. We could read "morning / Trumpets" as military instruments awakening intransitively into sound as they play the reveille, or assume that the "Trumpets bright" themselves wake the morning. When Beddoes reels off the triad of nouns in the trimeter, he creates what might be called a "hendiatria" (as opposed to a hendiadys), stressing the fact of mortality three times over, and then reversing it at a stroke: "Rise again." The "Dirge" that follows must have some connection with the "Song by Siegfried," for it also advocates a stoical suppression of feeling that looks ahead to Christina Rossetti's "Mirage." Compare "Sorrow, lie still and wear / No tears, no sighings, no despair" with Lie still, lie still my breaking heart; My silent heart, lie still and break: Life, and the world, and mine own self, are changed For a dream's sake.48

We also have a precedent in Nahum Tate's Dido and Aeneas, the lament of which has quietude and composure in the midst of grief: When I am laid, am laid in earth, May my wrongs create No trouble, no trouble in thy breast; Remember me, remember me, But ah! forget my fate.49

Beddoes's wordplay points to the dissimulative nature of the speaker's selfcontrol, "lie still" carrying a sense of continued mendacity while at the same time creating the image of a corpse-like sorrow laid out for burial. A modal shift redirects the poem from the imperative (which commands the quieting of his sorrow) to an indicative of resolution (the willed healthfulness of "And o'er my cheeks strew roses," which, with a stroke of irony, evokes the festivity of marriage). Beddoes's terminal dash might suggest the aposoiopesis of grief too overwhelming for words, or it might indicate that language has gone to ground, as it sometimes does in Emily

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Dickinson's verse, its dashes like sewn-up wounds in which other words lurk out of sight. Clearly Beddoes's thoughts have taken on a cosmic reach at this point, the combined earth and sea representing his cherished grief, and some extra-planetary star or divinity the recipient of that boon. "The Boding Dreams" could pass for another poem by Raupach, and deploys all the standard topoi of Raupachlichkeit, murder and sex not least amongst them. One wonders if, during his stay in Göttingen, Beddoes had come across Bach's cantata, "Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme", BWV 140, known in English as "Sleepers Awake." If so, and if he consciously deployed it here, its purpose would have been to sharpen the counterpoint of Isa. 40.3—"The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness"—against the violence of the narrative: In lover's ear a wild voice cried: 'Sleeper, awake and rise!' A pale form stood at his bedside, With heavy tears in her sad eyes. 'A beckoning hand, a moaning sound, A new-dug grave in weedy ground For her who sleeps in dreams of thee. Awake! Let not the murder be!' Unheard the faithful dream did pray, And sadly sighed itself away. 'Sleep on,' sung Sleep, 'to-morrow 'Tis time to know thy sorrow.' 'Sleep on,' sung Death, to-morrow From me thy sleep thou'lt borrow.' Sleep on, lover, sleep on, The tedious dream is gone; The bell tolls one. (p. 117)

Two additional biblical allusions introduce contrapuntal resonances into the poem, the first from Prov. 6— 9 How long wilt thou sleep, O sluggard? when wilt thou arise out of thy sleep? 10 Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep:

—and the second from Matt. 26.40: "And when he cometh unto his disciples, and findeth them asleep, and saith unto Peter, What, could ye not watch with me one hour?" The last of these, like Beddoes's poem, takes form as a threefold address that culminates in a final reproach: "Sleep on

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now, and take your rest: behold the hour is at hand, and the Son of man is betrayed into the hands of sinners." The title of the poem evokes Macrobian typology of dreams, one category of which centres on the apparition (phantasma or visum) that comes upon one in the moment between wakefulness and slumber, in the so-called "cloud of sleep." In this drowsy condition he thinks he is still fully awake and imagines he sees specters rushing at him or wandering vaguely about, differing from natural creatures in size and shape, and a host of diverse things, either delightful or disturbing.50

However, Beddoes's sleeper continues untroubled and unresponsive to the "visum" that visits him, apparently an emanation of the victim herself. An omniscient scribe records both the colloquy of victim and sleeper, and also the stylized contributions of death and sleep (impersonal, biological forces) to the lover's apparent indifference—apparent only, for it would seem that, realizing in retrospect that he has slept through these warnings, he will commit suicide out of remorse, and so fulfil death's prophecy of borrowed sleep. This contest between apparitional dream and allegorical abstractions over the fate of the lover and of his beloved (through whose death he has selfishly and soundly slept) goes back to the that moment in the "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" in which, according to Coleridge's prose gloss, "Death and Life-in-Death have diced for the ship's crew" (p. 194). This makes the dreamer's passivity all the more sinister, because it demonstrates the irresistible power of ananke. The refrain expounding this debate occurs at the end of each stanza, where it stabilizes the design and uses incremental repetition to point up crucial data. We could derive an epitome of the story from the contractive dimeters alone: "The bell tolls one" (where the measurement of time blends into the funeral rite, "one" signifying either the figure on a clockface or the nameless victim); "Soon comes the sun" (with its promise of salvation) and the deflection of that promise ("The murder's done"). Beddoes eventually connects the "pale form" that tries to wake the man with the victim herself, slipping in a crucial pronoun ("heavy tears in her sad eyes"—my emphasis), and then reasserting a neuter identity: "And sadly sighed itself away." She or it earns the epithet "faithful" by infection of the victim's own steadfast love, and tries to prevent the crime passionnel of a jealous rival (the only possible inference allowed by the death-kiss pressed "on rosy lips"). The mesmeric, iterative refrain, coming round with a slow predictability, intensifies the discontinuities of a narrative conducted through metonyms and hints: "A red wound on a snowy breast, / A rude hand stifling the last scream."

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After the grand guignol of this Sturm und Drang dream-poem, "Wolfram's Dirge" comes as a calming benediction. It originates in a "voice from the waters" (in contrast to earlier voices "on the waters"—my emphasis) and conveys a drowned man's posthumous acceptance of his death, rendered ventriloquially through a stream that passes by his grave. Beddoes places us in a wintry landscape like that in Shakespeare's Sonnet 73—"When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang / Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, / Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang"51—but chooses an even more desolate point in winter, trapping the inverted objects between the subject and the verb in a way that suggests a general encasement in a cold and tormenting universe—"The wind dead leaves and snow / Doth hurry to and fro" (p. 119)—that sends the swallow out from the comfort and enclosure of its nest. However, these dreary data, soon to be reversed by a change of season, supply tokens of the resurrection by which the violent weather, which seems at first merely to trouble the dead, shakes animating souls back into their bodies ("When a storm of ghosts shall shake / The dead, until they wake / In the grave." The limpid juxtaposition of tenor and vehicle in the first two lines—"The swallow leaves her nest, / The soul my weary breast"—shares the simplicity and dignity of Matt. 8.20: "The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head."

CHAPTER TEN THE IVORY GATE

Beddoes conceived The Ivory Gate as a medley of stories and poems, taking as his templates the keepsake and the album (institutions that he anathematized) and ironizing them from within. The gallimaufry that resulted, incorporating various "critical and cacochymical remarks on European literature,"1 would have pointed and undercut the insipidities of the ostensible models. The title alerts us to this fact, for, of the "geminae Somni portae" [two gates of Sleep] in Aeneid 6, the ivory provides a passage for deceptiveness: . . . altera fertur cornea, qua veris facilis datur exitus umbris, altera candenti perfecta nitens elephanto, sed falsa ad caelum mittunt insomnia Manes. [. . . the one is said to be of horn, and thereby an easy outlet is given to true shades; the other gleaming with the sheen of polished ivory, but false are the dreams sent by the spirits to the world above.]2

Donner states that political circumstances in Zürich put an end to the revision of Death's Jest-Book, "but before that time Beddoes had collected a number of lyrical poems which he intended to publish with some four or five prose tales and Death's Jest-Book under the title The Ivory Gate." He adds that the poems he planned for this volume "were either sung by characters in the tales themselves, or marked for the 'Appendix of Songs.'"3 We know, for example, that "The New Cecilia" (which figures in the Oxford edition under the poems associated with Death's Jest-Book) was at one point intended for the fifth chapter of The Ivory Gate—a fabliau exercise so far removed from the insipidities of keepsake verse as to prove yet again that the collection was intended to function as an "AntiAnnual." Four consecutive title pages confront us at the start—indicators of narrative developments, disjecta membra functioning as epigraphs, and poems designed as epigraphal openers. They have the incoherence of a

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dream landscape, but would doubtless have hung together if the plan had been properly executed. There is little point in speculating about such orts and scraps, for the whole enterprise has been damaged by Kelsall's decision to suppress its prose matrix. Two epigraphs alone make reasonable sense on their own terms. The first was intended to preface "The Lily Picked by Prosperpine," a title that alludes to that goddess's abduction as Milton conceived it—"where Proserpin gath'ring flow'rs / Herself a fairer Flow'r by gloomy Dis / Was gather'd"4—and perhaps the poem that followed would have been a narrative in which a virgin or newly-wed finds consummation on the sword instead of the membrum virile. That much, at least, seems implicit in the montage: In the twilight silent smiled All alone the daisy's eyelid, Fringed with pink-tipped petals piled. —In the morning 'twas no more; In its place a gout of gore. Break of day was break of heart, Since, dear maiden, dead thou art. (p. 120)

Just as Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho registers death by tracking the flow of blood toward a drain, so Beddoes uses an innocent flower (as opposed to lustral water) to record a murder that transpires "off camera." Ordinarily an aposiopesis is signalled by a dash at the end of an unfinished sentence, but here it figures at the start, implying a resumption rather than a breaking-off, while at the same time the blank space enacts the flower's obliteration. Beddoes leaves moot the question as to whether the daisy has been picked (like the lily of the overarching title) or whether it is still there, hidden beneath a gout of blood. Since the lyric purports to come from a collection entitled Charonic Steps, it follows that such steps must end on the banks of the Styx. The second epigraphal poem, rather more extensive, seems to critique the "silver spoon" strain in English fiction, which was then enjoying its undeserved vogue. "Chapter Last," in association with the tag "HAPPILY MARRIED" and the impatient, dismissive satiety of "THREE VOLUMES OF IT" protests the institution's over-use in fictional finales. Detachable and mobile hearts have long been a source of satire, not least because, by vacating the bosoms that house them, they demonstrate the literal heartlessness of their possessors. One thinks, for example, of the colloquy in Donne's "Blossom"—

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Well then, stay here; but know, When thou hast stayed and done thy most; A naked thinking heart, that makes no show, Is to a woman, but a kind of ghost; How shall she know my heart; or having none, Know thee for one?5

—and also of the coquette's heart in The Rape of the Lock: When Florio speaks, what Virgin could withstand, If gentle Damon did not squeeze her Hand? With varying Vanities, from ev'ry Part, They shift the moving Toyshop of their Heart; Where Wigs with Wigs, with Sword-knots Sword-knots strive, Beaus banish Beaus, and Coaches Coaches drive.6

This last creates a surreal sense of hearts on the move, even though the primary sense relates to the turnover of the stock within. Beddoes takes up where such bizarreries leave off, presenting the first stanza as an advertisement for a lost pet: Has no one seen my heart of you? My heart has run away; And if you catch him, ladies, do Return him me, I pray.

The hyperbaton of the first line treats the English language (analytic in character) as though it were synthetic, and, breaking apart the phrase "no one of you," causes the query to verge on incoherence. Not surprisingly, the speaker addresses an audience that seems to be exclusively female— keepsake and annual readers, perhaps—and, like all merely fashionable authors, has reached a point of eclipse, having commercialized his art into worthlessness and unreality: On earth he is no more, I hear, Upon the land or sea; For the women found the rogue so queer, They sent him back to me.

A heart prostituted is a heart dysfunctional—so valueless, indeed, that it's denied even the mock apotheosis that Pope accords Belinda's lock— "Some thought it mounted to the Lunar Sphere, / Since all things lost on Earth, are treasur'd there"—p. 240):

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Chapter Ten In heaven there is no purchaser For such strange ends and odds, Says a jew who goes to Jupiter To buy and sell old gods.

This interplanetary pedlar (and one wishes that Beddoes hadn't anticipated T. S. Eliot's lower-case J) vouches for its worthlessness even in the cycle of eclipses and replacements to which popular gods-of-the-moment are foredoomed. Oliver Twist tells us that the old-clothes trade in the early nineteenth century was conducted largely by Jewish merchants, and Beddoes, by displacing clothes with gods, implies that literary and dress fashions are largely commutable, each prone to functionless, eye-catching extravagance, and each centred on externals. He redefines Olympus (heaven) as Jupiter—a nice astronomical twist—leaving us uncertain as to whether the trader has done business with the president of the immortals or simply visited the planet named after him. The fashionable heart, having coldly disqualified itself from heaven, finds itself consigned to hell, evoked with the same sort of mealy-mouthed periphrasis ("Where demonesses go to church") that Pope had scorned in the "Epistle to Burlington": "To rest, the Cushion and soft Dean invite, / Who never mentions Hell to ears polite" (p. 593). The "Alpine Spirit's Song" owes its title to Kelsall, a title that misses the point, since the lyric's narrative matrix leaves no doubt of its being sung by a mortal—"As I yet stood and looked, a song burst from the window of the hotel behind me" (p. 122)—to that extent differing from Beddoes's earlier songs "on the water," which do have a Tempest-like immateriality. Of course it's entirely possible that a flesh-and-blood woman is singing a Lied about an immortal—a Lied such as "The Mermaid's Song" ("Come with me, and we will go / Where the rocks of coral grow"7), which turns on a magically effortless passage to southern seas. But mortals can also undertake unfeasible journeys. All they need is imagination, as witness Heine's wings of song: Auf Flügeln des Gesanges, Herzliebchen, trag ich dich fort, Fort nach den Fluren des Ganges, Dort weiß ich den schönsten Ort; [On the wings of singing, My dear, I lead you forth, Forth to the plains of the Ganges, Where I know a most beautiful spot;]8

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In Beddoes's poem we also travel through the air on "viewless wings of Poesy,"9 and if Kelsall assumed that this offered proof of a spirit persona, he had forgotten the topos of the mental journey. In my view, the speaker (recte singer) is much more likely to be a mortal who aspires to the speed and near omni-presence of disembodied being. This will become apparent if we place the poem alongside such "genuine" spirit songs as that from The Tempest 5.1.88-89 ("Where the bee sucks, there suck I: / In a cowslip's bell I lie"), with its otherworldly, Lilliputian scale. Just as cowslips are too small to be occupied by humans, so are volcanoes too hot, and spirit songs often record the habitation of the uninhabitable. Certainly those in Manfred conform to type: Where the slumbering earthquake Lies pillow'd on fire, And the lakes of bitumen Rise boilingly higher; Where the roots of the Andes Strike deep in the earth, As their summits to heaven Shoot soaringly forth; I have quitted my birthplace,10

Sometimes, too, spirit songs provide a list of tutelary duties. Leigh Hunt's "Nymphs" is, in effect, a taxonomy of genii loci,each with its assigned task— And there are the Napeads,—names till now Scarce known, I know not how, To the rich bosom of my mother soil; For they in meads and little corner bowers Of hedge-row fields take care of the fresh flowers.11

—a conception based on A Midsummer Night's Dream ("And I serve the Fairy Queen, / To dew her orbs upon the green"—2.1.8-9). Although we don't find anything comparable Beddoes's poem, Kelsall was possibly so struck by the similarity between the fairy's song from Shakespeare's play ("Over hill, over dale, / Thorough bush, thorough briar"—2.1.2-3) and "O'er the snow, through the air, to the mountain") that he rushed to judgement. The speaker of the lyric has chosen two animal talismans, the antelope and the eagle, and blurred them into a compound of mobile energy:

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Chapter Ten 'O'er the snow, through the air, to the mountain, With the antelope, with the eagle, ho! With a bound, with a feathery row, To the side of the icy fountain, Where the gentians blue-belled blow. Where the storm-sprite, the raindrops counting, Cowers under the bright rainbow; Like a burst of midnight fire, Singing shoots my fleet desire, Winged with the wing of love, Earth below and stars above.['] (p. 122)

One can trace vertical columns of reference down the anterior and posterior zones of the first three lines—"O'er the snow"/"With the antelope"/"With a bound"—as opposed to "through the air"/"with the eagle"/"with a feathery row." Beddoes then offsets abundant vigour with cheerlessness, the "icy fountain" and its discomfited "storm-sprite" very different in tone from Ariel's cowslip or Titania's fairy rings. He drives the difference home through a gauche and angular line—"Cowers under the bright rainbow"—where trochee, dactyl and antibacchius clash together and fail to create a pulse. "Gentians blue-belled" evoke the temperate bluebell (Endymion nonscriptus) even as they describe a montane flower—probably Gentiana brachyphylla, "a tiny gem" that comes from "high in the European Alps,"12an implicit contrastthat stresses the inhospitable nature of the terrain to hand. The tutelary nymph, far from busying herself with providential duties, performs the meaningless and Sisyphan task of counting raindrops, and to what end? As a futile gesture of possession? And do we read those raindrops as spray from the Alpine waterfall, or has the scene been enwrapped in foggy drizzle? The rainbow reference implies a light source, but before we can enjoy its prismatic beauty, Beddoes plunges us into a darkness riven by ordnance-like lightning ("fire"; "shoots"). Nor does the éclaircissement arrive with the single-line refrain. Perhaps it implies a pantheistic urge to marry the "Earth below with stars above," as in Lucretius: Postremo pereunt imbres, ubi eos pater aether in gremium matris terrai praecipitavit; at nitidae surgunt fruges, ramique virescunt arboribus . . . 13

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[Lastly, the raindrops pass away when father Ether has cast them into the lap of mother Earth; but bright crops arise, the branches upon the trees grow green . . .]14

The second stanza sustains the note of solitude, for it looks ahead to the mountain-haunting heroine of Wilhelmine von Hillern's Die GeyerWally (1875). Beddoes conceives his subject as a mysterious but palpable figure. Unlike the skimming Camilla in Book VII of The Aeneid, however, she leaves a tangible imprint upon the snow: Let me rest on the snow, never pressed But by chamois light and by eagle fleet, And the hearts of the antelope beat 'Neath the light of the moony cresset, Where the wild cloud rests his feet, And the scented airs caress it From the alpine orchis sweet: And about the Sandalp lone Voices airy breathe a tone, Charming the sense of love, Earth below and stars above.

Here we seem to have entered a sanctified space, a tabernacle untrodden by human foot. Beddoes introduces hints of Exodus, the cresset (beacon light) recalling the pillar of fire, and the "wild cloud" upon which the moon rests its feet the vapour that vectors divinity in Ex. 16.10—"and they looked toward the wilderness, and, behold, the glory of the Lord appeared in the cloud." By investing the moon with feet, Beddoes also turns it into a sort of deity, once again recurring to Exodus—"And they saw the God of Israel: and there was under his feet as it were a paved work of a sapphire stone" (24.10)—especially since, unlike the feet of chamois and antelope, these members make no impression on the snow. While "air" functions as a catechretic substitute for "scents" or "aromas," it also retains its musical sense, with a hint of The Tempest's aerial harmonies. At the same time, the exoticism of "orchis" (in the British imagination, at least, a rich purple hue) helps sensualize the coldness of the snow. A sexual charge also arises from that flower's name, derived from its testicular tubers, "much associated with fertility."14 Whereas the voice issuing from the cloud on Sinai was monolithic, moralistic and stern, that of the Sandalp presents a multiplicity of feminine, sensual voices. It is at this point that we encounter an "Alpine spirits' song," which Kelsall singularized and misapplied to the whole. The syntax leading up to the refrain in the first strophe is intransitive and, in a sense, ineffectual, for

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the desire implied by the shooting and the singing fails to drive home to its (unspecified) goal. Rather, it resembles the casual, uncausal action of Longfellow's "I shot an arrow in the air, / It fell to earth, I knew not where,"15 so that the refrain drifts along in a vaguely locative way for want of syntactic nexus. At the same time, the voices of the Sandalp might be taken to have a transitive effect, charming the earth and the stars into a marital union à la Lucretius. The unfocussed human desire of the first stanza yields to the providential tasks that Hunt had assigned to his tutelary "oreads" in "The Nymphs," the fusion they effect cunningly registered by a singular noun ("a tone"). The problem this poses for polyphonic voices is skirted by the fact that "a tone" can be redisposed to produce the phrase "at one." As if to demonstrate this cosmic unity, the third strophe becomes an epibaterion or departure poem, not unlike the one we find in Semele: Hence, hence, Iris hence away, Far from the realms of day O'er Scythian hills to the Maeotian lake, A speedy flight we'll take.16

The flight that Beddoes imagines is no less dark and murky than Congreve's, and its destination as cold and comfortless, notwithstanding the fact that the speaker has been joined by a second presence, presumably that of her lover: Through the night, like a dragon from Pilate Out of murky cave, let us cloudy sail Over lake, over bowery vale, As a chime of bells at twilight In the downy evening gale, Passes swimming tremulously light; Till we reach yon rocky pale Of the mountain crowning all, Slumber there by waterfall, Lonely like a spectre's love, Earth beneath, and stars above.'

One needs, first of all, to make sense of "Pilate," who clearly can't be the Roman governor of Palestine. Since the "murky cave" stabling the dragon is a hell-mouth in all but name, "Pilate," anglicized from Latin participle "pilatus" ("armed with a javelin") is probably intended to invoke the idea of death ("black it stood as night, / Fierce as ten Furies, terrible as Hell, / And shook a dreadful Dart"17). Beddoes has capitalized the participle to

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create an absolute personification, death conceived as "the javelined one," or, as in Paul's taunt (1 Cor. 15.55), the carrier of a sting. Though there is nothing illogical in the idea of a dragon-despatching death, one can't help remarking with Dr Johnson that while the thought is not obvious, neither is it just, and the "the reader, far from wondering that he missed [it], wonders . . . by what perverseness of industry [it was] ever found,"18 especially since the dragon to hand is only a simile. The speaker's passage through the air, whether on Heinian "Flügeln des Gesanges" or by other means, is effortless but obscure. By using an adjective instead of an adverb ("let us cloudy sail"), Beddoes creates an appositive relation between epithet and subject, and recalls the quasiSinaitic cloud of the Sandalp earlier in the poem. The journeyers pass over an erotic landscape reminiscent of Hunt and Keats ("bowery vale" recalls places of "nestling green for poets made,"19 "bowery clefts" and "bowery green"20)—and its temperate nature also jibes with Tennyson's claim that "Love is of the valley."21 However, the destination proves unappealing— an infertile and exclusionary "rocky pale" (with the sharp etymon of palum or stake)—and while "crowning all" might seem to strike a note of triumph, it also confirms our sense of barren altitude. No consummation is hinted for the couple, but rather the fatal sleepiness that leads to hypothermia. They remain detached, and, because pater Aether and mater Terra fail to converge, the refrain lacks harbourage in the sentence as a whole. The prose codetta parallels rather than equates the mysterious music of the Sandalp with the poem as a whole, a fact that Kelsall overlooked when he chose his title: "The music of the Sandalp she sang of could not have come more startlingly to the brain of solitary shepherd than these sounds to me." It resembles the flat and reductive comment that caps the terminal lyrics of Love's Labour's Lost: "The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo" (5.2.922). Kelsall also misnamed the poem that follows, which has nothing to do with the futility of unrequited love, the "love-in-idleness" of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Rather, it takes the form of a courtly trial poem, the lover negotiating further and further concessions from his mistress until he crosses a crucial threshold, and forfeits all. One often encounters such patterns in romance narratives, as witness the Grimms' "Fisherman and His Wife," in which a fish grants fulfilment to increasingly hubristic wishes, and eventually punishes the wisher: 'What does she want now?' said the fish. 'Ah!' said he, 'she wants to be the lord of the sun and moon.' 'Go home,' said the fish, 'to your ditch again!' and there they live to this day.22

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Beddoes has given his poem a ritual predictability, casting it as three pleas and three responses, two of assent and one of dismissal, each of which corresponds to the ages of humankind of Ovid's Metamorphoses. The first is the golden— Aurea prima stat est aetas, quae vindice mollo, Sponte sua, sine lege fidem rectamque colebat. [Golden was that first age, which, with no one to compel, without a law, of its own will, kept faith and did right.]23

—which loses quality in turn and tails off into the silver— . . . subiit argentea proles auro deterior, fulvo pretior aere. [. . . the silver race came in, lower in the scale than gold, but of greater worth than yellow brass] (pp. 10-11)

—before issuing in the bronze: Tertia post illam successit aenea proles saevior ingeniis et ad horrida promptior arma, [Next after this and third in order came the brazen race, of sterner disposition, and more ready to fly to arms savage . . .] (pp. 10-11)

Beddoes's enumeration of the three loves, while it corresponds to this temporal arc (the most intense being the first), also recalls the Greek typology of storge (dutiful love, comparatively sexless), philia (friendship because the sexual element has still not fully declared itself), and eros (violent and violating, as in the age of bronze). While He and She remain blank cuing titles, their identities change over the course of the poem, the content of the first, third, and fifth stanzas evincing a physical maturation. The tone of the first is largely infantine: He: 'Shall I be your first love, lady, shall I be your first? Oh! then I'll fall before you down on my velvet knee And deeply bend my rosy head and press it upon thee, And swear that there is nothing more for which my heart doth thirst, But a downy kiss and pink Between your lips' soft chink.' (p. 123)

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Beddoes conveys this innocent entreaty with a tentative "shall" rather than a determined "will." The "velvet knee" suggests a Renaissance page—say, a Marc Smeaton platonically infatuated with Anne Boleyn—but whatever the (unspecified) historical reality, it creates a courtly context for the triptych. The "rosy head," while not excluding the idea of fresh youthfulness, hints at an Anacreontic crown of flowers, and while its "deep" bending evokes the reverence of religio amoris, it also suggests a child's taking refuge in its mother's lap. By the same token, the "downy kiss" encompasses both the peach-like complexion of the beloved, and the down on the lover's upper lip, signifié of adolescence. The kiss, too, is comparatively chaste (notwithstanding a vaginal hint in the wording) because its limitation sets it apart from the abandon of Catullus' "dein mille altera, dein secunda centum" [then another thousand, then a second hundred]24). "She" answers in kind: She: 'Yes, you shall be my first love, boy, and you shall be my first, And I will raise you up again unto my bosom's fold; And when you kisses many one on lip and cheek have told, I'll let you loose upon the grass, to leave me if you durst; And so we'll toy away The night besides the day.'

The beloved then advances and intensifies the erotic content in her response. She, for her part, instead of simply assenting to the proposal, she takes it further, and, acting as a Lycaenion to her suppliant's Daphnis, educates him in the ars amatoria: "making love doesn't just mean kissing and embracing."25 Significantly enough, her vocative is "boy" (as opposed to his reverential "lady"), and she also takes the initiative by holding him to her bosom. She furthermore invites him to turn his agapaic single kiss into a Catullan multitude, using the verb "tell" (in the sense of "count") to confound any Mother Grundies who might be to hand. If that had failed, they would have been sufficiently confounded by the eccentric phrasing by which an omitted article (in the source phrase "many a one") creates the oxymoron "many one." The superior experience and worldly wisdom of the woman emerges in the way she turns her lover into a pet, giving him notional freedom to stray, but knowing all the while that his attachment will bring him home. By referencing the night in her plan of action, she hints at an intensification of sensual pleasure. The third stanza contains an imperious jussive subjunctive, taking us into the world of the serenade and aubade in which lovers snatch their pleasures when society's back is turned. The adversative introduces an air

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of negotiation, for, having been tutored by his Lycaenion, the male now begins to speak with the voice of experience: He: 'But let me be your second love, but let me be your second, For then I'll tap so gently, dear, upon your window pane, And creep between the curtains in, where never man has lain, And never leave thy gentle side till the morning star hath beckoned, Within the silken lace Of thy young arms' embrace.

"Gentle" tapping on the pane indicates the need for circumspection, and so does the furtiveness of "creep." Doubles ententes turn "innocent" activities into sexual metaphors, the window pane suggesting the hymen, and the tapping a phallus that attempts cautiously to pierce it. Patrick Gale's Rough Music contains a slang phrase for the vagina ("the sinisterly suggestive Beef Curtains"26) that, like many of its kind, might date back in time. If so, the intimacy described as "creeping between the curtains in" might be doubly graphic. "Between," after all, suggests an act of penetration rather than that of drawing curtains round a tester bed. At this point, the vocative gains in intimacy ("dear" instead of "lady"), and so does the woman's response ("thou" displacing "you"), which offers a consensual quid pro quo. She increases the force of his "silken lace" to the point of immobility ("lock thee with my arms / All silent up in charms"), and so recalls the fate of Merlin, imprisoned by an enchantress despite "all the craft that he could do."27 By detaching "up" from "lock," Beddoes programmatically trusses up the sentence. This incapacity would seem to prompt the violent climax in which the male, trying to re-assert his power, threatens to rape the woman, and, whereas once he had used the tentative future ("Shall I be your first love"), he employs instead a brutal indicative ("I will be thy third love"): He: 'No, I will be thy third love, lady, aye I will be the third, And break upon thee, bathing, in woody place, alone, And catch thee to my saddle and ride o'er stream and stone, And press thee well, and kiss thee well, and never speak a word, 'Till though hast yielded up The margin of love's cup.'

Violence registers in the exaction of "yielded up," whereas in the preceding stanza the woman had more reciprocally "yielded unto." Having formerly been locked in her arms, the rapist now takes possession of the vagina through a displaced image of ingestion—"The margin of love's cup." This final transgression proves that he has failed an erotic test such

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as we find in mediaeval tales, whose "authors had a particular fondness for such tests and demonstrations," taking "an unusually noble and virtuous hero," and subjecting "him to unusually severe strains."28A fortiori Beddoes's catastrophic finale, for the woman revokes all her concessions, and offers crypto-phallic retribution instead soft compliance. "Yield to thy kisses, like a bud in April's shower" becomes "pierce thy flesh with thorns." The last, along with her dirk, evoke the rape-executing membrum virile, and the dirk itself, by pushing the drama north of the border, transmutes a landscape of bowers and towers into something wilder and more discomfiting, more suited to the murder/suicide with which the poem concludes. The poem's oscillation between shaggy, shambling fourteeners and trimeters suggests an attempt at orderliness that never comes off, and provides an emblem for the entire enterprise. "The Reason Why" takes two Latin poems as its starting point. The first is Martial's Thirty-Second Epigram— Non amo te, Sabidi, nec possum dicere quare: hoc tantum possum dicere, non amo te. [I like you not, Sabidius, and I can't tell why. All I can tell is this: I like you not.]29

—and the second, Catullus LXXXV: Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior. [I hate and I love. Why I do so, perhaps you ask. I know not, but I feel it, and I am in torment.] (pp. 162-63)

Those two "quares" have been picked up in the title, presumably Beddoes's own, since there is no editorial attribution to Kelsall. But the point of all three poems—Martial's, Catullus' and Beddoes's—centres on the contradiction of reason by feeling, something that, in consequence, can't be explained: I love thee and I love thee not, I love thee, and I'd rather not, All of thee, and I know not what. A flowery eye as tender, A swan-like neck as slender, And on it a little brown spot For tears to fall afraid on And kisses to be paid on, Have other maidens too.

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Chapter Ten Then why love I, love, none but you? If I could find the reason why, Methinks my love would quickly die. (pp. 124-25)

The short, antithetic phrases, cancelling each other out, amount to a pastiche approximation of a chop-logic Metaphysical poem. Beddoes even borrows a teasing juxtaposition from Donne's "Lecture upon the Shadow", placing a vocative "love" alongside the nominative. Compare "Stand still, and I will read to thee / A lecture, love, in love's philosophy"30 with "Then why love I, love, none but you?" Also Donnian is the obsessive capping of each strophe with the word "die." This recalls, inter alia, the strategy of "Lover's Infiniteness," whose strophes all culminate in "all." No surprise, therefore, that Beddoes's poem should comprise a knot of "strong lines," those enigmatic, compacted nuggets of verse that set the "understanding on the Rack"31: And tried I hate, I know not what My heart would do for mourning; Love I,—wit bursts, love scorning. O loveliest hate, most hateful love,

By omitting the preposition and conditional conjunction from "[If] tried I [to] hate," the poet brings his utterance to the brink of incoherence, and then draws it back again through a tidy chiasmus compounding love and hate. However, we can still glimpse the Romantic Beddoes through the interstices of the pastiche, "flowery eye" a characteristic catachresis that could have been avoided by his having used "flower-like" instead. Whereas we should be acknowledging the physical consonance of the conjoined objects—fringed petals and fringed eyelids; the actions of opening and closing—Beddoes forces us to entertain the bizarre idea of an eye that gushes flowers instead of tears. The "Epilogue to Ernest's Story Sung by Norman" (a title that tells us next to nothing) repeats the Metaphysical turn of its predecessor. Beddoes deploys the conceit of a physically independent heart from Donne's "Blossom," and couched it in the language of a "lost pet" notice. Memories of that familiar newspaper context would have sharpened the oddity of the loss. Its interrogative start has many lyric precedents, among them "The Bluebells of Scotland" ("Oh where, and oh where, is your Highland Laddie gone?"32) and Jonson's "Have you seene but a bright Lillie grow, / Before rude hands have touch'd it?"33: Has no one seen my heart of you? My heart has run away;

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And if you catch him, ladies, do Return him me, I pray. (p. 125)

Violent hyperbaton divorces "one" from "of you," and suggests the emotional levity of the speaker, indifferent as to where the genitive adhesion "of" occurs. The second stanza resumes after a lacuna in the narrative, the women addressed in the first having found the heart and returned it on account of its defectiveness. Its subsequent expulsion from heaven suggests an equal deficit of agape, leaving it with only one other destination. Though, like Pope's dean who "never mentions Hell to ears polite,"34 Beddoes doesn't spell it out, he leaves no doubt as to where we are, the church-going demonesses a mirror image of their counterparts in the upper world. At this point he composed and then rejected the line "the fair black devils I must birch" (p. 126 n), supplanting its frontal, excoriating sarcasm with the obliquity of an unnamed hell. The ballad stanza serves the satire well, creating a dissonance between the folksiness of the form and the sophisticated and innovative diction it funnels. At one point, for example, the miscellaneous oddity of "odds and ends" finds itself embodied in the topsy-turviness of "ends and odds." "The Tree of Life" takes its cue from Norse mythology: This world had for its centre a great tree, a mighty ash called Yggdrasill. So huge was this tree that its branches stretched out over heaven and earth alike. Three roots supported the great trunk, and one passed into the realm of the Aesir, a second into that of the frost-giants, and a third into the realm of the dead. Beneath the root in giant-land was the spring of Mimir, whose waters contained wisdom and understanding.35

We become aware remarkable quality of Beddoes’s imagination the moment we turn from that bare exposition to his proto-Lisztian paraphrase of its details: There is a mighty, magic tree, That holds the round earth and the sea In its branches like a net: Its immortal trunk is set Broader than the tide of night With its star-tipped billows bright:

The opening line reads like a credal declaration at the start of a hymn. The poet would have known Isaac Watts's "There is a land of pure delight / Where saints immortal reign,"36 and, given his Oxford connections, had

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probably also encountered Keble's "Septuagesima Sunday" in The Christian Year: "There is a book, who runs may read, / Which heavenly truth imparts."37 Irony informs the same declarative strategy here, since "tree" is a standard Christian periphrasis for the cross ("Jesu, who but thou had borne, / Lifted on that Tree of scorn"38), whereas this tree, far from being an instrument of torture, is maternal and attentive in character. In the Scandinavian myth, the branches of Yggdrasill merely stretch, whereas those of Beddoes's hold, their tenure as delicate as secure, for "like a net" conveys both a sense of inescapability and hammocky comfort. The juxtaposition of "round" and "earth" recalls the "round earth's imagined corners" (Donne, p. 311), offering a satellite-view of the planet as a ball lodged amid branches that etch themselves on its blue surface like notional lines of latitude and longitude. By making the trunk broader than the tide of night, Beddoes creates a landscape at once sublimely inconceivable and vivid—as though a celestial mangrove grove were able every day to breast the surge of time that threatens it with extinction. The allegory blurs the moment it begins to crystallize, for the literalizing logic that Brooks and Warren applied to Joyce Kilmer's tree—"If the tree is compared to a human being, the reader has a right to expect a consistent use to be made of the aspects of the human being which appear in the poem"39—would do even greater damage to Beddoes's. Beckmesserish demands for consistency, however, will necessarily founder on intentional violations of logic, and consistency is the last thing we should expect from Beddoes, Symboliste avant la lettre. This applies a fortiori to the next phase of the poem, which renders human thought as a parasitic plant: Human thought on it doth grow Like the barren mistletoe On an old oak's forehead-skin. Ever while the planets spin Their blue existence, that great plant Shall nor bud nor blossom want;

It seems counter-intuitive to speak of "barren mistletoe" (Grigson tells us that it was believed to be an aphrodisiac40), but Beddoes wants to stress the intellect's rootless separation from the animal cycle with which it is interinvolved. Earth's marginality in the greater scheme of things is pointed by other blue planets lodged in the branches, the metaphor of the net extended in the verb "spin," which, while it conveys their rotary motion about their axes, also projects the cat's-cradle of orbits within its compass. By having it fructify in and out of the season, Beddoes all but turns the tree into a

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diagram, although its "arboreality" re-asserts itself from time to time. He figures the first stage of life as an actual budding, and then converts those buds into an abstraction of infancy. The juvenile foliage of some trees (the American Buckeye, for example) is pink in colour, and Beddoes uses this datum to evoke an infant's skin: Let us mark yon newest bloom Heaving through the leafy gloom; Now a pinkish bud it grows Scentless, bloomless; slow unclose Its outer pages to the sun, Opened, but not yet begun. Its first leaf is infancy Pencilled pale and tenderly, Smooth its cheek and mild its eye: Now it swells and curls its head— Little infancy is shed. Broader childhood is the next— (pp. 126-27)

This differs markedly from Housman's strategy of in his poem "On Wenlock Edge." There the relationship between tree and humanity centres on a correlation of wind with passion, each respectively racking the subjects and securing their equation: There, like the wind through woods in riot, Through him the gale of life blew high; The tree of man was never quiet: Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I.41

By contrast, Beddoes's tree produces crops of human lives, but he is as unable to "explain" their context as Yggdrasill to clarify the life cycle it purports to embody. Both inventions simply present us with ontological absolutes. The Lockean idea of the mind as a tabula rasa upon which the world imprints itself has prompted the choice of "page," and the fission between tenor and vehicle widens when the poet identifies a single petal with infancy (rather than the bud as a whole), and again picks up the idea of a blank slate in "Pencilled pale and tenderly." There follows a bizarre but arresting allegory about the displacement of light by darkness: And the thunder-bee sweeps by On its brown wet wing, to dry Every day-star's crystal cup Of its yellow summer: . . .

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This becomes opaque the moment we try to identify tenor and vehicle. What is a thunder bee? Something extrapolated from the native American notion of a thunder bird? Or simply a bumble bee so sublimely big that its wings vibrate like thunder? Is its wing only semblantly wet—the glisten of its membrane in the light—or is it waterlogged, and, if so, by what agency? And how odd (but bracing) the transition from its wetness to the desiccative drinking up of sunlight (or the light of the morning star, since "day-star" admits both constructions). "Epilogue to Chapter 1," subtitled "Edward's Song," illustrates a claim in The Book of Common Prayer that "In the midst of life we are in death."42 Goethe's "Nähe des Geliebten" has supplied a template, discovering the beloved (as it does) in every aspect of the world—"Ich denke dein, wenn mir der Sonne Schimmer vom Meere strahlt; / Ich denke dein wenn sich des Mondes Flimmer in Quellen malt"43 [I think of you when the sun glitters off the sea; I think of you when the glimmering moon paints the fountains]—before revealing that "die Geliebte" has in fact died, and awaits the speaker among the stars: "die Sonne sinkt, bald leuchtet mir die Sterne, o wärst du da" (p. 243) [the sun sets; soon the stars will shine for me: O wait there for me]. Beddoes has adopted Goethe's anaphoraic restatement of the same sentence at the start of each strophe, and has at one point borrowed his very words, translating "Ich denke dein" as "I think of thee": I think of thee at daybreak still And then thou art my playmate small, Beside our straw-roofed village rill Gathering cowslips tall, And chasing oft the butterfly Which flutters past like treacherous life. You smile at me and at you I, A husband boy and baby wife. (p. 127)

Such innocent eroticism recalls a sculpture by Claude Cayot44 in which an infantine Cupid and Psyche lock together in a passionate embrace, while the setting as a whole suggests such rococo landscapes as Boucher's for the opera Issé45—foretaste of the idylls of le Petit Trianon. Beddoes sounds a dissonant note by recasting the butterfly, Christian "symbol of eternal life, of metamorphosis,"46 as a figure of disappointment. In fact, images of sorrow—the tear prompted by the woman's portrait in the second stanza, the apparent weeping of Venus in the third, and the revelation of the beloved's premature death in the last—constitute a funereal ribbon that threads them all together. Beddoes aligns the tableaux

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of the evolving love affair with phases of the day (morning, noon, evening and night)—a more systematic (but more mechanical) scheme than Goethe's—and creates an additional cohesion by invoking various aerial phenomena: the butterfly, the love that falls "like young rain," the passage of a dart (simultaneously Death's and Cupid's) and, finally, the breath of the beloved. The "Epilogue to Human Woe" is very much an allomorph of its predecessor, based on three erotic tableaux, and moving from childhood to death. Beddoes has devised a more restless stanza form here, the staid alternating rhymes of "Edward's Song" now pulled apart and inverted in chiastic patterns. It also has the same ficelle of sorrow that had linked the stanzas of the preceding poem. In the first strophe, a carpe florem conceit concretizes time as a posy, rendered half abstract by "green," since the epithet registers notional youth more than it does the colour of the component flowers: "We tossed about the flowers / And wreathed the blushing hours / Into a posy green and sweet." By the same token, the roses give off a thundercloud instead of perfume—"And the blooming sweet-briar breathed weather." Dissonances recur in the second strophe, a restful summer dusk provoking tears—"Still my eyelid's dewy, my veins they beat / At the starry summer-evening weather"—their cause explained, in the third, by a death. Beddoes superposes a funeral on a wedding, the speaker seeming to arrive at a sexual consummation—"And we are man and wife together"—and then revealed in mourning at the woman's grave. He defies mortality by reliving their shared life, and the poem, instead of ending with a tetrameter as hitherto, grows an irregular tail. The sequence of a five-stress line, Alexandrine and fourteener provides a conspectus of the graph traced by the lyric as a whole: "We're boy and girl and lass and lad and man and wife together." A similar double-exposure of life and death obtains in "Dirge and Hymeneal." A fragment of the prose matrix remains attached to the text, and helps to clarify its content, though that would have been clear enough without it. Beddoes weaves an antiphony of voices, one within the church and one inside an open grave in the churchyard. The fool derives his imagery from the rape of Proserpine in Paradise Lost IV— . . . Not that fair field Of Enna, where Proserpin gath'ring flow'rs Herself a fairer Flow'r by gloomy Dis Was gather'd . . .

—and recycles the topos of the picker picked:

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Chapter Ten She cut the roses down And wreathed her bridal crown. Death, playful, culled her blossom And tore her from life's bosom.

By tapering the stanza from a trimeter to a two-stress line and then to a single spondee, Beddoes creates a rudimentary technopaegnion in the form of an hourglass. His obsession with the commutable darts of Eros and Thanatos recurs in "The Two Archers," the vivid proem of which owes recalls Shelley's ode "To a Skylark": At break of bright May morning. When triumphing o'er dark The sun's inspired lark, All sprites and spectres scorning, And laughing at all creatures' joys Who could not hang and dive and poise In their own web and flood of noise, Dropped out of his heart's treasure The sunbeam's path along Sparks and dews of song, As if there were no pleasure But to rise and sing and fly Winged and all soul into the sky;

The reference to May establishes the poem as a reverdie, but instead of participating in human joy at the arrival of the spring, the lark remains indifferent to the world it leaves in its wake, and is equally careless of disembodied "sprites and spectres" that attend it. This detachment produces a paradigm of ecstasy similar to Shelley's ("Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! / Bird thou never wert"48). The latter's synaesthetic fusion of liquid and sound— From rainbow clouds there flow not Drops so bright to see As from thy presence showers a rain of melody. (p. 640)

—has shaped the lines "Dropped out of his heart's treasure / The sunbeam's path along / Sparks and dews of song." With the lark established in the heavens, the poet paints in the lower part of the panel, a composition based on the "Choice of Hercules . . . the Concertatio Virtutis cum Voluptate."49 He places a "maiden young and coy" beneath the "break of this Morning" carried over from the first stanza

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as an incrementally adjusted "architrave" for each of the following. They also share a recurring "pediment," viz, "Winged and all soul into the sky." The maiden provides an analogue for the figure of Hercules, and on either side of her Beddoes situates the emblematic figures of Eros, (Voluptas), and Thanatos (Virtus). He recurs to the chapman formula of "DreamPedlary," but has each figure intone an identical patter, shooting their respective darts into rosebuds and bringing them to an erotic climax: Each cried 'Come buy our darts, They are with magic laden To deify the blood; An angel in the bud, Half-closed, is a maiden, Till opened by such wound she fly Winged and all soul into the sky.'

"Deify the blood" contains the poem's crux, since "blood" is the Elizabethan metonym for sexual desire. The lark takes its carnal reality to the point where it transfigures into something akin to, but removed from, itself. To this "condition of music"50 the maiden herself aspires by virtue of her ecstatic love. The wounded bud signifies her pierced hymen, and the rose's "opening" the aperient expansion of the mind into the universe at large (she is Wagner's Isolde before her time). But, remembering how the loss of love had embittered his own life, Beddoes assigns the maiden the "wrong" choice of voluptas, speeding up the failure of the flesh so as to dramatize its unreliability. In the last stanza, the displacement of May by December recalls the poem from The Passionate Pilgrim— Youth like summer morn, Age like winter weather, Youth like summer brave, Age like winter bare:51

—and the bleak, silent landscape in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" ("Though the sedge has wither'd from the lake, / And no birds sing"—p. 351): So one December morning, When the bold lark no more Rebuked the ghosts so sore, When dews were not adorning Aught but that maiden's cheek where wide The blushes spread their leaves, to hide

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The maiden has fallen in love with Love himself, and the complex allegory assimilates her with the flowers upon which the archers have demonstrated their darts. Sexual congress is implied by the fact of her shame, which recalls that of Goldsmith's Olivia: The only art her guilt to cover, To hide her shame from every eye, To give repentance to her lover, And wring his bosom—is to die.52

Having found no transcendence in love, the maiden eventually awards the palm to death, Eros' rival. "The Lily of the Valley" begins like an acclamatory reverdie, but soon moves to a foreboding similar to that in Donne's "Blossom" ("Little think'st thou, poor flower . . . that I shall / Tomorrow find thee fall'n or not at all"—p. 44): Where the hare-bells are ringing Their peal of sunny flowers, And a bird of merry soul Sings away the birthday hours Of the valley-lily low, Opening dewily and slow Petals dear to young and fair For the prophecy they bear Of the coming roses— The free bold bird of merry soul Amidst his leaves cannot control His triumphant love of spring. (pp. 132-33)

An ironic allusion to Keats's nightingale ("and quite forget / What thou among the leaves hast never known"—p. 207) morphs the poem from an untroubled flower song into a memento mori. This lily of the valley reminds us much more of a celebrated Metaphyical rose— . . . whose hue angrie and brave Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye: Thy root is ever its grave, And thou must die.53

—than it does, say, Wordsworth's celandine, straightforwardly saluted as a harbinger of spring: "Prophet of delight and mirth, / Ill-requited upon

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earth." 54 The anadiplosis that weaves the first stanza into the second creates a sense of entanglement, and forces the bird to convert its song from ode to threnody: Thou bird of joyous soul, Why can'st thou not control Thy triumphant love of spring? I know that thou dost rally Thy spirit proud to sing, Because to-day is born The lily of the valley. Oh! rather should'st thou mourn; For that flower so meek and low, Born with its own death-bell, Only cometh to foretell Unpitying winter's doom, Who in scorn doth lay it low In the tomb.

An ironic reminiscence of the proclamation in Luke 2.11—"For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord"—displaces soterial assurance with a Todesverkundigung. By ringing its own death-knell, the lily becomes a "self-inwoven" simile (or in this case, metaphor), stating a phenomenon "is its own nature, or . . . sustains itself by supporting itself."55 Far from sounding a carillon in honour of the vivifying spring, it looks ahead to the sterility and death of winter. This sinister inflection of a flower ordinarily used to figure humble beauty might have been suggested by the German folklore that claims the "Lily of the Valley originated from the tears which the Virgin shed at the foot of the cross."56 "A Lament" (p. 133) is a montage poem. It begins with an umbrageous landscape like that in Goethe's "Gefunden": Im Schatten sah ich Ein Blümchen stehn, Wie sterne leuchtend, Wie Äuglein schön.57 [In the shade I saw A flower standing, Shining like a star, Like a beautiful tiny eye.]

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Like his German predecessor, Beddoes focuses the flower's radiant conspicuity within its shadowed context: In the twilight smiled All alone the daisy's eyelid, Fringed with pink-tipped petals piled.

But at this point, an offstaged horror registers in Hitchcockian terms, anticipating the shower scene from Psycho: —In the morning 'twas no more; In its place a gout of gore. Break of day was break of heart, Since, dear maiden, dead thou art.

The asymmetry of the stanzas has a disquieting effect, for the confident, cumulative triplet finds itself displaced by a squared-off couplet quatrain. Reading the fourth line, one might assume that the flower, as in Donne's "Blossom, " had fallen prey to frost, but we soon realize that, instead of vanishing, it has been obscured by a clot of blood. Thus does the poet redefine the pink corolla of a Bellis perennis as a dark red seal, the daisy as a surrogate maiden, and its effacement as the image of her death. The elegant duplication of "break" to suggest the affirmation of dawn on the one hand, and the negation of happiness on the other, brings the poem to its patterned conclusion. "Dirge" shows a stoic resignation in the face of death, for whereas traditional threnodies use jussive subjunctives to register a sense of loss— "Let the Irish vessel lie / Emptied of its poetry"58—Beddoes does the opposite, refusing to displace dew with tears, and so to supplant fertilizing moisture with the infertile saltiness: Let dew the flowers fill; No need of fell despair, Though to the grave you bear One still of soul—but now too still, Since the still soul fled— One fair—but now too fair, The lily being dead.— (p. 134)

Traductio cats-cradles the various significations of "still" to affirm the immaterial existence of the person being buried (one "still of soul" in the sense of "still possessing a soul")—even as it acknowledges the immobile quietude ("still" in the sense of "silent") that points to the fact of death.

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Such riddling creates a sense of sangfroid, for it implies grief has been mastered to a point where word-play has become conceivable. The frequent dashes have the effect of causing the funeral cortège to stagger and pause as the anagnorisis drives home, for to acknowledge death's inevitability is to arrive at a state of calm. Beddoes enhances the beauty of the dead woman by dematerializing it: she is a Platonic lily eclipsing all its eidola. The following image also figures dissolution of matter. We could construe it as an extra-planetary view of earth that includes the mantling ocean (grave of millions), or as the dewy grass that becomes wave-like when the wind stirs it into rhythmic undulation: For beneath your feet the mound, And the waves that fleet around, Have meaning in their grassy and their watery smiles; And with a thousand sunny wiles Each says, as he reproves, Death's arrow oft is Love's. Aye, doubt'st thou of the reading there, About all nature's movements seek: Thou'lt find Death has his dimples every where, Love only on the lovely cheek.

Here those favoured Beddovian topoi, Death's dart and Cupid's arrow, have been harmonized into commutability instead of being set apart in an antithesis. The reproof that the sunny landscape/seascape administers to the cortège relates to its failure of vision. While earth's innumerable dimples might constitute evidence of burials, they are also the signifiants of laughter, and represent a comic acceptance (rather than tragic signalization) of mortality and transience. The "Fragment" bears a proleptic resemblance to the serenade in Tennyson's Princess— Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white; Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk; Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font: The fire-fly wakens: waken thou with me.59

—for Beddoes has resorted to the same crypto-Mediterranean elements, and adopted the same argument by analogy, climaxing in an erotic imperative: As veined petal closes over A dewy spark

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Chapter Ten Ere Eve is dark, And starry fireflies flit and hover, Dreams of the Rose O'er it repose; So bend thy head, and sleep awhile In the Moon's visionary smile. (p. 134)

The veined petal—synecdoche for the corolla as a whole—evokes the shape and veining of an eyelid, and the globular drop of dew that it holds the eyeball of the beloved. Eve could be evening personified (as she in Collins's "Ode to Evening"—"If aught of oaten stop or pastoral song / May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear"60), but she could just as well evoke the biblical archetype of womanhood. "Ere Eve is dark" refers both to the onset of night and the dreamy oblivion into which the beloved is about to slide. The spark all but extinguished by the petal's folding inward is reignited when fireflies and stars begin to prick through the gloom. Either they externalize the dreams of a flower that has withdrawn into itself, or Beddoes has simply added them as decorative ancillaries in their own right. If "dreams" be construed as standing in apposition to "fireflies," then a relative conjunction must have gone missing from "Dreams of the Rose / [That] o'er it repose." A strange solipsism pervades the image, for the flower is either dreaming hermetically about itself, or the womanconceived-as-flower about herself. Narcissistic dreams are de facto exempt from passion, a fact that enhances the restfulness hymned here. Indeed, the very fact that the rose dreams of herself neutralizes the eroticism that traditionally attaches to this flower, guaranteeing the chastity of the male's invitation, especially since the "Moon's visionary smile" displaces passionate redness with a blue-white radiance. The fragmentary and underpunctuated quatrain that follows has the same suggestively uncertain syntax as the first, especially when it allows the bird to scent a flower with its song: And in that rosy rosy hour When bird sung out and scented flower Came words to me from heaven above: 'Awake, young heart, awake and love.' (p. 135)

A certain poignancy inheres in the fact that this fresh, eager aubade—its eagerness caught by the epizeuxis of "rosy rosy"—was written by a man old before his time, and in the evening of his life "The Flowery Alchemist" invites comparison with the betrayed-maiden topos of "Early One Morning"—"O don't deceive me! O never leave me! /

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How could you use a poor maiden so?"61—and that fine Shakespearean planctus, "A Lover's Complaint." It's a form full of surprises, for just as one of its famous avatars—"Now springes the spray"—has the maiden plan revenge—"Yiff I may, it shall him rewe / By this day"62—so Beddoes unexpectedly uses it here to vector a libertine's take on seduction. The title seems to imply an actual alchemist who seeks his elixir outdoors instead of in the laboratory, but the riddle is solved when we realize that a bee has created the gold of honey from commonplace flowers (base metals, as it were): Hist, oh hist! My pretty pale young violet, Thy moony cheek uncover; Lift that hood of fallen sky, And my lips once more I'll wet Against the dew-ball of thine eye. Hist, oh hist! (p. 135)

Since at this point we don't have a handle on the speaker's identity, the poem reads like an erotic kletikon in the manner of the "veined petal" fragment. In some love lyrics (Donne's "Twicknam Garden," for example), lovers sip tears—"And try your mistress' tears at home, / For all are false, that taste not just like mine"63—but since the speaker is a bee and the eye in question a flower, such assumptions fold before the fact that we're dealing with a drop of dew. Bees logically turn their backs on the flowers from which they've gathered pollen, but Beddoes reads this pragmatic behaviour as the unprincipled sensualism of a Regency buck. Hence the free, racy diction— "A stinging gay intriguing fellow"—which anticipates the informality of Emily Dickinson's snake poem ("A narrow Fellow in the Grass / Occasionally rides"64). Nor does the poet fail to stress the significance of the bee's phallic sting, and the gaudy dandyism of its get-up. The set-piece of seduction upon which it relies—now called a "pick-up" line—derives, inter alia, from Cressida's vow of fidelity and punishments with which she bolsters it: If I be false, or swerve a hair from truth, When time is old and hath forgot itself, When water-drops have worn the stones of Troy, *** —yet let memory From false to false, among false maids in love,

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Beddoes has scaled down that heroic votum into a miniature that might have been uttered by an Ariel or a Titania: Glowworm's lightning blind me When I leave my bud's embrace, When I traitorously forget Thy cerulean baby's grace.

While "baby" has been used attributively—"baby grace"— the apostrophe seems momentarily to materialize an actual infant out of the congress of bee and violet, fruit of their unsanctified and shortlived union, and the source of the "shame" that issues in the flower's death: The very next night he told the tale To a little lily of the vale, And the poor young violet died of shame.

Like "The Flowery Alchemist," the title of the next poem—"Song of the Stygian Naiades"—amounts to a little poem in and of itself. How bizarre (and at the same time inventive) to have peopled the underworld waters with nymphs, a concordia discors that, because it allows "Stygian" a chromatic as well as a locative force, seems for a while to invest those nymphs, ordinarily depicted as being fair, with dark skins: Proserpine may pull her flowers, Wet with dew or wet with tears, Red with anger, pale with fears; Is it any fault of ours, If Pluto be an amorous king And come home nightly, laden Underneath his broad bat-wing With a gentle earthly maiden? Is it so, Wind, is it so? All that I and you do know Is that we saw fly and fix 'Mongst the flowers and reeds of Styx, Yesterday, Where the furies made their hay For a bed of tiger cubs, A great fly of Beelzebub's. The bee of hearts, which mortals name Cupid, Love and Fie for shame. (p. 136)

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Conventional siren songs describe the activities of their singers, as witness the mermaids in Oberon (which premiered at Covent Garden in 1826, and might well have been known to Beddoes): "Oh! 'tis pleasant to float and sing, / While ever our dripping locks we wring."65 But whereas Weber's mermaids use the first-person plural to create a sense of community, the "we" in this poem encompasses only the singer and the wind in whom she confides. Moreover, the focus falls on events transpiring on the banks of the Styx rather than the things the naiad herself is doing in its murky waves. There's a reason for this shift of emphasis, for the amours of Pluto, though less celebrated than those of his Olympian brother, were almost as extensive: Hades, who is fierce and jealous of his rights, seldom visits the upper air, except on business or when he is overcome by sudden lust. Once he dazzled the Nymph Minthe . . . and would have seduced her without difficulty had not Queen Persephone made a timely appearance and metamorphosed Minthe into sweet-smelling mint. On another occasion Hades tried to violate the Nymph Leuce, who was similarly metamorphosed into the white poplar standing by the pool of Memory.66

Persephone, it seems, was no less jealous than Hera, which explains her unsettled frame of mind in the poem. The fact that she is "pulling" (as opposed to the plucking) flowers points to a suppressed anger, and their wetness seems to be connected to her tears. While the adjectives "red" and "pale" are syntactically attached to the blooms themselves, they also index an inner turmoil that might have reddened and whitened her complexion by turn. Beddoes anticipates recent assimilations of bats with vampires by investing Dis with chiropteran wings that have no basis in Greek mythology, but which might been inspired by Milton's Satan, who "in the emptier waste, resembling Air, / Weighs his spread wings" (p. 256), and also by the dragon in Book 1 of The Faerie Queene, whose "flaggy wings" are "like two sails."67 Pluto's daily "consumption" of "a gentle earthly maiden" is, after all, the traditional diet of those mythological reptiles. Since monarchs are autocratically wilful, and since their consorts have simply to endure their adulterous liaisons, the poem might also be drawing a parallel between the king of the underworld and the current king of England, whose extra-marital affairs had by this time become a by-word. Poets speak truth to power—Leigh Hunt's fearless attack on George IV had landed him in prison—and that prerogative produces the mysterious allegory by which the naiad passes judgement on Pluto.

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The hell she inhabits, like Shelley's, is "much like London" (p. 379), with errant husbands and grieving, resentful wives—a mock-heroic inferno, in other words, more comic than terrible. Alan Halsey remarks that even if Beddoes were "obsessed with death," it behoves us to acknowledge "how often and cheerfully he mocks that obsession's absurdity," adding that "it may have been awareness of absurdity which chiefly possessed him, of life as much as death."68 This delight in incongruity manifests itself when a bee alights on the "flowers and reeds of Styx,"—this idyllic version of the underworld is sunlit—while the Furies, like Belgravia belles, are entranced by a litter of kittens, albeit tiger kittens, a neotonous take on a standard emblem of cruelty ("O tiger's heart, wrapped in a woman's hide" —King Henry VI, Part III, 1.4.137). The insect observed by the naiad is clearly a fly in the archaic sense, that is, any winged invertebrate, as in "The Canonization"—"Call her one, me another fly" (Donne, p. 47). Indeed love becomes this bee, as capable of stinging (a witty displacement of Cupid's arrows) as of "honeying" over "the nasty sty" (Hamlet 3.4.93-94). The three monikers ("Cupid, Love and Fie for shame") represent agent, emotion and consequence, the "Fie for shame" ambiguously applied to the pregnant victim and the faithless lover who abandons her. The second stanza lodges an objection to this summation, however, and the satiric poet, detached from, and thus immune to, love's exigency, anatomizes it in all its fly-like absurdity. Satirists can induce a sense of shame by broadcasting misconduct, so that Jaques, the archetypal exposer of vice, will "through and through / Cleanse the foul body of the world" (As You Like It 2.7.59-61). The naiad, too, will raise the moral tone of Hell: "But if Pluto does't again, / It shall sing out loud his shame." Kelsall ripped "Silenus in Proteus" from its tale-matrix, but a little narrative flesh still clings to it. This passes off the poem as an Aeschylean fragment, rather as Beddoes had earlier pretended to translate Raupach while in fact producing a pastiche of that author. Donner remarks that the Proteus "was a satyric drama acted after the Oresteia on its first public presentation" and that the "lines that survive bear no resemblance" (p. 700) to it. Not only that, but the title seems incoherent. The "in" has a locative force, but since Proteus is a god and not a place, one almost senses that Silenus might be one of Proteus' many avatars. This hints at Keats's belief that poets are always "filling some other Body,"69 for Beddoes, now stout (he was already plump in the Oxford portrait) and given to alcoholic excesses, probably found a sympathetic vector in Dionysus' old pedagogue.

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The poem embodies intense nostalgia for a culture untroubled by any Manichean horror of the flesh: Oh those were happy days, heaped up with wine-skins, And ivy-wreathed and thyrsus-swinging days, Swimming like streamy-tressed wanton Bacchantes, When I was with thee and sat kingly on thee, My ass of asses. (p. 137)

Beddoes has gone to school on the abandoned, flagrant choruses in the Bacchae— Where are you, Dionysus? Leading your dancing bands Over the mountain slopes, past many a wild beast's lair, Or on Corycian crags, with the thyrsus in their hands?71

—but there is also an additional note of elegiac yearning. This looks ahead to Dowson's "Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae / Sub Regno Cynarae": I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind, Flung roses, roses riotously in the throng, Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;72

By transferring the epithets "ivy-wreathed" and "thyrsus-swinging" from the rout of people that wore and carried them and by re-attaching them to "days," Beddoes creates an effect of befuddlement, further enhanced by the temporal vagueness of the participles that crowd in upon each other. He also heightens the sense of unsteadiness and incoherence by shortcircuiting the syntax, so that "happy days" find themselves heaped up with "thyrsus-swinging days," a stalled logic of drunkenness that reduces time from purposive graduation to pleasant flux. Isaac Watts had sternly placed mortality sub specie aeternitatis ("Time, like an ever-rolling stream, / Bears all its sons away"73); Beddoes, without any sacrifice of inexorability, allows the components to bleed into each other, for the days that bear the bacchantes into oblivion are like the creatures themselves, swimming beside them as their own hair streams in its liquid medium: "Swimming like streamy-tressed wanton Bacchantes." After this bacchanale has passed by us in an undifferentiated blur, Silenus focuses on his donkey, either present as a corpse before him, or evoked in memory. This takes the poem in a new generic direction as the evocation of a vanished, riotous past gives way to a personal sense of loss. The poet has drawn inspiration from the classical pet threnody, for just as Catullus had imagined the passage of Lesbia's sparrow into Hades—"qui nunc it per iter

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tenebricosum / illuc, unde negant redire quemquam" [Now he goes upon the dark road, thither whence they say no one returns],74 so Silenus projects a reunion with his ass in a shadowy parody of their former life: But thou art dead, my dapple, and I too Shall ride thee soon about the Elysian meadow, Almost a skeleton as well as thou.

The idea of bereavement as a stranding on earth, a waiting to rejoin a vanished beloved, had been broached in other Beddoes poems. Here he enriches its poignancy with an echo of another animal elegy, Cowper's "Epitaph on a Hare"— He, still more aged, feels the shocks From which no care can save, And, partner once of Tiney's box, Must soon partake his grave.75

—a topos derived in turn from Henry King's "Exequy" and other poems like it: . . . and fill the roome My heart keeps empty in thy Tomb. Stay for me there; I will not faile To meet thee in that hollow Vale.76

Some versions of the Silenus legend describe him as "an autochthon, or a son of Pan" (Graves, 1:67), a god, but not an immortal one, as Plutarch makes clear in "De Defectu Oraculorum": As for death among such beings, I have heard the words of a man who was not a fool nor an impostor. . . . Suddenly from the island of Paxi was heard the voice of someone loudly calling Thamus. . . the caller, raising his voice, said, 'When you come opposite to Palodes, announce that Great Pan is dead.'77

Whether Silenus' current emaciation result from mortal illness, or whether it offer a proleptic glimpse of a fleshless afterlife, there can be no doubting that "almost a skeleton as well as thou" travesties everything that he has stood for. The poem therefore becomes triply elegiac, weeping for the death of the ass, the demi-god it carried on its back, and an all-butvanished way of life. The sacral properties with which the Bacchantes had invested their totems turn out to be illusory—"And why, oh dearest,

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could'st not keep thy legs / That sacred pair, sacred to sacred me"—the pleonastic repetition of "sacred" suggesting the impotence of ritual in the face of death. The poem that Gosse entitled "Lord Alcohol" (p. 138) is a chanson à boire, its noisy "scat" refrain ("Sing heigh! Ho! Diddle!") an allotrope of similar moments in Henry Carey's "Polly Peachum"— Ha, ha, ha, ha; Do, re, mi, fa, Are now but Farce and Folly, We're ravish'd all, with Toll, loll, loll, And pretty! Pretty POLLY.78

—and Our Mutual Friend ("Rumty iddity, row dow dow. / Sing toodlely, teedlely, bow wow wow"79): Who tames the lion now? Who smoothes Jove's wrinkles now? Who is the reckless wight That in the horrid middle Of the deserted night Doth play upon man's brain, As on a wanton fiddle, The mad and magic strain, The reeling, tripping sound To which the world goes round? Sing heigh! ho! diddle! And then say— Love, quotha, Love? Nay, nay! It is the spirit fine Of ale or ancient wine, Lord Alcohol, the drunken fay, Lord Alcohol alway! (p. 138)

Beddoes's mock-heroic claim for alcohol—its ability to make the world go round—parodies the motive force with which Dante had invested love in the Paradiso: But yet the will roll'd onward, like a wheel In even motion, by the love impell'd, That moves the sun in heaven and all the stars.80

The second stanza of pits humankind against the universe. Housman, possibly influenced by its boozy argument, would also offer an ironic

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apotheosis of liquor as a source of wisdom ("malt does more than Milton can / To justify God's ways to man"81): Who maketh pipe-clay man Think all that nature can? Who dares the gods to flout, Lay fate beneath the table,

Pipe-clay recalls the red earth of Adam's name, but at the same time does homage to tobacco, a substance that Beddoes also held dear. The unfinished "Song" is a reverdie, but a reverdie of projection rather than record. It might have inspired Browning's "Home-Thoughts, From Abroad," which does the same thing in reverse, valorizing an English Spring above its Mediterranean equivalent: "The buttercups, the little children's dower / —Far brighter than this gaudy melon flower."82 Beddoes, however, doesn't establish any distance between himself and the scene he describes. The yearning centres rather on difference of being ("O would we were he") rather than locality. Anapaests generate an exultant throb that accords with the vernal spirit of the poem, as later in Atalanta in Calydon ("When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces, / The mother of months in meadow or plain / Fills the shadows and windy places"87): The snake is come out The bee is about, In the sunny delight of Hymettus; O would we were he, The gay dappled bee, For then the Narcissus would let us Drink out of her bosom, Ambrosian blossom, To the health of her neighbour, the Olive, The first drop of spring; Oh! happy the thing That in Greece the mellifluous can so live.

(p. 139)

The inclusiveness of Beddoes's imagination registers in the presence of that snake, not an animal ordinarily hymned in mediaeval spring songs, though Shelley gave it a place in his Hellas reverdie ("The earth doth like a snake renew / Her winter weeds outworn"83). In the context, the "sting" with which it is customarily invested seems no more threatening that those of the bees that feature so prominently. Since the honey of Hymettus was supposed to rival that of Hybla—"pascat et Hybla meas, pascat Hymettos apes" [or Hybla or Hymettus feed my bees]84), Beddoes can draw a

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connection between literal and poetic sweetness, given the roots of "mellifluous" in "mel" (honey) and "fluere" (to flow). He turns to virtuoso rhyming to evoke the abandon and recklessness of other May songs, at one point knitting an intractable place name ("Hymettus") with a whole sentence ("would let us"), a feat that challenges comparison with "hypotenuse" / "a lot o' news"85 in The Pirates of Penzance. In the second strophe, the elision of "Pours his love loud and rich" looks back to Gray's "Ode on the Spring"—"The Attic warbler pours her throat"86—by reconstituting the throat as a jug: The green frog of the ditch, Pours his love loud and rich, Coaxing the water-maid's shoulder, And round golden eyes Darts in amorous wise A sheaf of love's bee-stings like arrows; And Love's in the wood, In a goat-footed mood, Dancing with Pan and his fellows; So the nymphs may take care Of their treasury rare Of bosoms and cheeks the sun mellows.

Some doubt hovers over the identity of the "water-maid." Since we're in a ditch, she might be no more than an elegant periphrasis for a frog, mounted from behind by her mate (hence the focus on "shoulder" and the cautious gradations of "coaxing"). Since his "round golden eyes" can't look directly into hers, they beam unfocussed pleasure to the world at large. But perhaps the water-maid is a naiad that, in a way that half-recalls the Grimm tale of "The Frog-Prince," engages in erotic play with an amphibian. Whatever the reading embraced—female frog or nixie—a spirit of mischief carries the day, not least in the way the shafts of Eros, replaced by bee-stings, become merely similaic ("like arrows"). At the same time, Eros himself (evoked by the upper-case L of "Love") embraces his "goat-footed" other self, and turns honorary faun. This erotic landscape of honey, bees, narcissus and olives is Beddoes's version of the "warm south," but whereas in the "Ode to a Nightingale" the idea of a cold north had only been implied, here it figures as an actual antipode: But here oh ho! Cold, Snowy, mountainous, old, Is the earth of the barbarous island. Through icicles white

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Chapter Ten Pale beams the cold light, Like the life through the coldblooded fish-eye.

The words "snowy" and "mountainous" evoke England less readily than they do Switzerland, the likely site of composition, but Beddoes is less concerned with actual topography than with what it symbolizes. He sets up a cold, puritanical alternative to the Greek landscape, reverting to the time when Britain had only just been colonized by the Romans (hence the reference to barbarism). Then, when the Mediterranean humanism of its conquerors seemed alien, it had a remote, constricted vision of things (or so one gathers from the fact that a cold-blooded fish-eye distortedly compacts its data into a circular frame). The blanched landscape, beautiful after a fashion, offers a chill antiphon to the black, gold, cream and green of the palette embraced by the preceding stanzas. "The Unfinished Draft" is in such a rudimentary state that one can't be sure if it comprise two versions of the same material, or whether it represent an exercise in incantatory repetition: The snow falls by thousands into the sea; A thousand blossoms covers The forsaken forest, And on its branches hovers The lark's song thousandfold; (p. 140)

Beddoes registers nature's fecundity through the repeated "thousands," the abundant flakes dissolving into a featureless ocean, and prompting the metaphorical modulation to the snow-like blossoms (pre-echo of Housman's cherry trees) that time will also dissolve. So dense is this flowering that it forces the apparent false concord of "A thousand blossoms covers," reducing individuality to singleness. The duplication of real by figurative snow provides an element of structural symmetry, upon which Beddoes superposes another pattern—the triad of blossoms, birds and babies: The snow falls by thousands into the sea; A thousand flowers are shedding Their leaves all dead and dry; A thousand birds are threading Their passage through the sky; A thousand mourners treading Their tearful churchyard way In funeral array: Birds, whither fly ye?—whither, dead, pass ye?

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The snow falls by thousands into the sea.

Although the opening stanza is incomplete, the second and third might represent the poet's final thoughts, since their structural irregularities have an expressive force that a more rigid design might have vitiated. It's possible that Beddoes even wanted to bring the first strophe into closer conformity with its successors. Having sealed up the last stanza with inclusio, he could have applied the same structural figure to the poem as whole. As it stands, the three imponderable questions—whence, whence and whither—meet with a nihilistic silence, the silence of snowflakes that dissolve in a featureless sea. One wonders if the "The City of the Sea", subtitled "An abandoned fragment," might be an off-cut from "The Cyprian Statuary," which also begins with an account of a shore-built town. Its evocative mystery arises from the inconsequential woodland images at the start, since these have no syntactic or material consonance with the marine data that follow, and since there is no "as" to prompt the "so." Taking as a point of departure Gray's "Ode on the Spring," which begins with an "Attic warbler's" pouring her throat, and later presents a tableau of air-borne insects— Yet hark, how through the peopled air The busy murmur glows! The insect-youth are on the wing, Eager to taste the honeyed spring, And float amid the liquid noon; Some lightly o'er the current skim, Some show their gaily-gilded trim Quick glancing to the sun. (pp. 51-52)

—Beddoes condenses these images into a distich: Flowed many a woodbird's voice, and insects played On wings of diamond o'er the murmuring tide, (p. 140)

This recapitulates the elision of Gray's "float amid the liquid noon"—air and water each indistinguishable from the other—by linking "flowed" to "murmuring tide," and translating "gaily-gilded trim" into the perdurability of "diamond," ironically dissonant with a frail wing. "The Father of the Deep" would seem to be a titanic lament along the lines of Keats's "Hyperion," though Beddoes has also subjoined to it an alien story of filial redemption and restitution:

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Chapter Ten Who passed by sea or land Beheld an ancient monumental man, Aye sitting by coeval ocean's side, Titanic, upright, with large eyes whose use Was but to weep to them invisible And therefore twice dread woes. His watch no man Had seen begun, nor yet hath seen him end. Turned towards sunset, wishing for his own, He there expects the coming of his son, Eldest of things created save himself, Over the western billow—

Nemesis, a daughter of Oceanus who came "to personify 'Divine Vengeance,'"88 has here been regendered as a figure of revenge, one that promises, in Judaic-messianic terms, to return the dispossessed Titans to power. That, at any rate, is how I read "wishing for his own," a syncretic farrago for which there is no classical source. In its unfinished state, the poem remains largely inscrutable. Perhaps its point of departure is a topographical feature—a Mediterranean headland shaped like a man, perhaps, with water seeping from its eye-like sockets. The fact that it provides a point of reference for travellers gives it the status of a landmark, as dependable and unchanging as the "Patience on a monument" by which Shakespeare had figured a comparably static grief in Twelfth Night 2.4.115. The apparent hopelessness of the figure's sedentary vigil, indicative of delusional madness, brings "Sir Patrick Spens" to mind: O lang, lang may the ladyes sit, Wi' their fans into their hand, Before they see Sir Patrick Spens Come sailing up the strand!89

The "Lament from Thanatos" seems to have an autobiographical undertow, the lament of a man who has spent the best part of his life waiting for someone to find him, sealed up in a world of unconfessing silence and solitude: I was to wait, to wait my only time of youth away— As many a maiden isle far in the sea From Adam and Columbus did for him Who was its destined finder— Silent as a mountain before it falls, or as the world shall be on doomsday eve, Keeping the secret of to-morrow's morn, Still as a summer's noon— (p. 141)

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This idea of insular human beings living in hope of a complement owes something to Plato's Symposium: "Whenever the lover of boys—or any other person for that matter—has the good fortune to encounter his own actual other half, affection and kinship and love combined inspire in him an emotion which is quite overwhelming, and such a pair practically refuse ever to be separated even for a moment."90 Beddoes creates just such a sense of predestined attachment by invoking two explorers (one mythic, one historical) and the terrae incognitae that await their arrival. One wonders how the poem would have advanced, and whether its untidy decameter would have been split in two, or have been left in all its bulky clumsiness to suggest the imbalance of a mountain about to implode. Defying the traditional wisdom of Donne—"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main"92— Beddoes has looked ahead to the counter-claim of Arnold's "To Marguerite, in Returning a Volume of the Letters of Ortis": A God, a God their severance rul'd; And bade betwixt their shores to be The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea.92

By bracketing Adam and Columbus, the poet stresses an archetypal maleness that, taken in conjunction with the "maiden" isles (in this case emblems of virginity rather than femaleness), eroticizes the act of encounter. The "Song of Thanatos" owes a major debt to one of Mignon's song in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre— Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn, Im dunkeln Laub die Gold-Orangen glühn, Ein sanfter Wind vom blauen Himmel weht,93

—except a tropical American landscape has been substituted for Goethe's Italy: The mighty thoughts of an old world Fan, like a dragon's wing unfurled, The surface of my yearnings deep; And solemn shadows then awake, Like the fish-lizard in the lake, Troubling a planet's morning sleep. (p. 142)

This evocation of prehistoric life preserved in an unexplored continental fastness anticipates Conan-Doyle's Lost World, and contains some actual premonitions of the Cretaceous period as we now conceive it. Modern

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scholarship would offer no objection to plesiosaurs disporting in lakes, or to a Quetzalcoatlus soaring above them "with the wingspan of a World War II fighter aircraft"94—a datum that finds a match in the "dragon's wing unfurled." Dickens's comparable effort in Bleak House is wider of the mark: "As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill."95 The phrase "old world" initially suggests that Thanatos, like Mignon, has been displaced from her native country, and is singing her poem on an alien continent. However, the American allusions in the second strophe show that she has the New World in mind, for in the prose prelude she stresses her unfamiliarity with the flora and fauna of Europe ("I know not the meaning of a daisy, nor what nature has symbolized by the light bird and the butterfly"—p. 142), and sets their alienness against her remembered landscape: "my ancient sire used to sit with me under the old dragon tree of Dracaena." Dracaena draco, which "can become huge in the wild,"96 is a native of the Canary Islands rather than of Central America, so Beddoes must either have been nodding, or thought that his lyric could dispense with botanical accuracy in its drive to modulate from Dracaenas to dragons. Thanatos contains these physical data in her mind, the dragon and fish-lizard functioning as similes for the stimuli that penetrate the unconscious, while its troubled surface owes something to the Bethesda myth: "For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatever disease he had" (John 5.2). Her song proves equally sanative, quenching her "nostalgy" both by evoking the past and by acknowledging the transience of things. When, for example, she claims to have been "as happy as the ephemeral fly balanced on his wing in the sun, whose setting will be his death-warrant," we think of "chilled by age, their airy dance / They leave, in dust to rest" (p. 53) in Gray's "Ode on the Spring." The second strophe shifts from sleep to consciousness, ontologically contained by another consciousness in turn—perhaps with a hint of metempsychosis. Minds thus open into minds, as tins into tins on the baking-powder canister: My waking is a Titan's dream, Where a strange sun, long set, doth beam Through Montezuma's cypress bough: Through the fern wilderness forlorn Glisten the giant harts' great horn

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And serpents vast with helmed brow.

In her imagination, Thanatos visits a world so far back in time that the very sun seems alien. Beddoes has imagined a landscape like that in reconstructions of the Carboniferous period, one thickly stocked with Cyatheacids and Cycads ("the fern wilderness forlorn"). Luck rather than scientific prescience has created this serendipity, for, unconsciously prompted by the names of ferns—"Platyceriums (often known as staghorn ferns)"97 and "Phyllitis scolopendrium ('hart's tongue fern')" (p. 315), the poet has peopled the forest with anachronistic deer. Rather more suitable to such a context are the "serpents vast with helmed brow," with their hint of Quetzalcoatl, the Aztecs' "blue, feathered-serpent God of the Winds."98 Although Beddoes wouldn't have known that snakes evolved long after the age of the dinosaurs, he might well have been au fait with the findings of Richard Owen, whose "Report on British Fossil Reptiles in the Report of the Eleventh Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1841," referred to a "gigantic marine Saurian [that] must have had a capacious and bulky trunk, but propelled by a longer and more Crocodilian tail than in the modern whales."99 The final stanza begins with a reminiscence of "Kubla Khan"— "Through caverns measureless to man"100—but transfers the epithet from those antres to the creatures that they spawn: The measureless from caverns rise With steps of earthquake, thunderous cries, And graze upon the lofty wood; The palmy grove, through which doth gleam Such antediluvian ocean's stream, Haunts shadowy my domestic mood.

Since Beddoes didn't have access to current conceptions of Sauropods, whose "[p]illar-like arms and legs supported a body that was bigger than several elephants put together,"101 there is a further serendipitous accuracy in "steps of earthquake" and "thunderous cries," reminding us that the Apatosaurus "was once called Brontosaurus ('thunder lizard')."102 More remarkable still is the quality of the verse that mediates these projections. It withholds direct vision and measurement in a typically "sublime" way, registering the hugeness of the creatures by the reverberation of their footfall and by cries so loud that they seem to proceed from a stormy heaven. Such peripheral glimpses of enormity and enormousness prove far more telling than any frontal transcription would have been. By letting us glimpse the ocean through primeval trees, the poet also presents us with

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the medium in which all life began and into which all its elements eventually return. Conventional approaches to ephemerality place human achievement sub specie aeternitis, but this poem inverts the procedure and places its vista of antediluvian life sub specie domus, subtending the quotidian location of the speaker with intimations of mortality. These become all the more disquieting in view of the vastness and apparent invulnerability of creatures that have vanished beyond recall.

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The uncompleted "Threnody" that begins this hold-all of fragments and last poems would seem to recur to the loss of Reich (or a Reich equivalent), the male pronoun leaving no doubt about the crucial role of this bereavement in hastening Beddoes's decline into alcoholism and despair: Far away, As we hear The song of wild swans winging Through the day, The thought of him, who is no more, comes ringing On my ear.1

Singing swans provide an emblem of mortality, for in Ovid's Heroides, Dido, when about to take her life after Aeneas' betrayal, compares herself to that bird: Sic ubi fata vocat, udis abiectus in herbis ad vada Maeandri concinit albus olor [Thus, at the summons of fate, casting himself down amid the watery grasses by the shallows of Maeander, sings the white swan]2

The swans' song brings the absent beloved to mind as an involuntary memory similar to those that Proust would trace in Remembrance of Things Past, the abstract "thought of him" indivorcible from the sound that triggers the memory. White swans, hard to detect high up in a brilliant sky, would trench on invisibility, registering (like Shelley's skylark) as an immaterial source of music, an image of the immaterial youth who haunted the poet in his twilight years. While the first-person plural ("As we hear") arises from the shared experience of gnomic generalities, ("as" construed as a comparative), it could also be read as an essayistic/critical "we," in which case "as" becomes temporal, the speaker transferring a personally observed datum on to the page. Beddoes has crafted a beautiful

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stanza of terse dimeters, followed by a trimeter and a yet more expansive pentameter (later a tetrameter). This in turn expands to an Alexandrine, the compacture of the one and the looseness of the other enhanced by the masculine and feminine rhymes assigned to each in turn. Just as in a terminal lyric from Love's Labour's Lost, the cuckoo's jolly song evokes an unexpected response—"Cuckoo, cuckoo; O word of fear, / Unpleasing to a married ear" (5.2.893-94)—so too does the swans': Gentle fear On the breast Of my memory comes breaking, Near and near, As night winds' murmurous music waking Seas at rest.

This trepidation, while probably related to the speaker's own death, might also centre on a memory of the beloved's deathbed, the dying body held against his chest (or so the external preposition "on" would seem to imply). This distressing experience replays itself in the mind, but memory has softened the anguish to a point where an oxymoron can begin to crystallize ("Gentle fear"). However, if the sinister "night winds" that wake "Seas at rest" be harbingers of storms, then it follows that the speaker's quiescent grief will revert to its former violence. The fragment breaks off before the tenor of the next simile has driven home, but there can be no doubt that Beddoes was thinking of the desolation of a beach at nightfall, as Arnold after him—"on the French coast, the light / Gleams, and is gone."3 His monitoring of the sunset ("Grow pale, and in changing hues and fading motion / Wane and die") recalls the way "youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies"4 in the "Ode to a Nightingale," and the oxymoron of "blest / Tearful eye" compounds the delight that the beloved once afforded with the misery prompted by his death. The unfinished line, though reminiscent once again of Keats ("Do I wake or sleep?"—p. 208), lacks that epistemic uncertainty, and hints rather that bereavement has plaited a dark ribbon through Beddoes's adult life. The two fragments entitled "Tiberius Caesar" testify to the same obsession with corrupting power that informs Death's Jest-Book, and also externalize through an alter ego the increasing detachment that Beddoes himself felt from life around him. He presents the Roman as the warrior of Germania (rather than the unprincipled sybarite of Capri), flooding him with a cold northern light. "Icy gold" attenuates that metal's warm colour into something pale and silvery, while, at the same time, his crimson robe elides the torrents of blood that characterized his reign. Beddoes invests

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him with a Nordic pallor at odds with Suetonius' account ("a handsome, fresh-complexioned face, though subject to occasional rashes of pimples"5) to enhance the idea of a man with iced water in his veins: "Palest among pale Romans." The following fragment offers an ecphrasis of the fresco on the east wall of the Sistine Chapel—or rather a partial ecphrasis, for it has been set in a dynamic liturgical context, a Mass ending as the poem begins. Michelangelo's frescoes had been darkened over the centuries by soot from sacral candles and thuribles, and also by the torches that guides used to illuminate their detail, as the opening lines suggest: Dim shone the pallid torches' trembling ray And the last gush of voices died away, As bleeds the sunshine of a stormswept day Upon the panting sea. (p. 154)

An aural background is supplied by Psalm 50, perhaps in the setting by Allegri, whose Miserere the Vatican reserved for its exclusive use. Certainly the "gush of voices" suggests that composition's massed choral chant, out of which a single treble line intermittently emerges in a sort of "wail." But no sooner has Beddoes registered the liturgical context than he dissolves the setting into a Romantic landscape: A cloudlike ruin, tempest-overcast, Lay bursting hearts, and listened for the blast Of trumpet, the dead-awakening, last, 'Mid wailing of Miserere mei domine.

Because of the poem's fragmentary state, the syntax misfires here, needing a preposition of placement to locate the "bursting hearts" that belong to the congregants, and which Beddoes heaps up in a sacrificial hecatomb, as if convulsed by the terror that the fresco has inspired: The hearts were heaped, and through them lightning passed The thought of the last trump's dead-kindling blast; Then met the prostrate wretches' tearful gaze, Moved with the waving incense' circling haze, The Sistine wall with Michael's wrath ablaze: The Judge of mercy weary, The Demon's vengeful glee.

The "storm" of Michelangelo's cloudy composition gives rise to the lightning image, half visual, half sonic, that coincides with the imagined

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sound of the last trumpet. This the poet invests, through the commutability of apposition, with the fieriness of a thunderbolt. Moved by the chanting of the penitential psalm, the congregants find their gaze "met" by the mural, advancing not only out of its own vaporous reality, but out of the incense that keeps pulsing from the thuribles. This further obscures and effaces the composition, and enhances its sublimity. It's almost as if the work were palpably driving itself home. One might at first blush think that "Michael" refers to the archangel, but since it's Uriel who is delegated to sound the trumpet, we must construe it as an Englishing of "Michelangelo," and the painting as a vector of his own anger: The Last Judgement we are shown neither a gentle nor a suffering Christ. Here, on the last day of the world, he has returned to earth to pronounce his judgement upon humanity as a muscular, beardless young man. Charged with a powerful energy that glows about him, he epitomises the idea of a vengeful God.6

Beddoes reinforces this take with a para-rhyming trimeter couplet—"The Judge of mercy weary / The Demon's vengeful glee"—for when the quality of mercy is strained by vengeance, deity and anti-deity blur into each other. That Beddoes means both halves of the distich to apply to the judge can be inferred from the fact that Michelangelo has omitted a satanic counterpart. The fragmentary text now turns by default into proto-modernist verse like that of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the discontinuity of its lines creating a collage of annotations flung down and held in tension with each other instead of being integrated into a coherent argument: The rainbow-prism of heaven's choired daughters, Wafted athwart downdashed entwined slaughters Of countless damned—So break and fall, waters, With miserere Into Eternity.

Compare those last three lines, for example, with the conclusion to "The Windhover," which, though obviously richer, reveals the same congestive packing: "and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, / Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion."7 Beddoes's ecphrasis well conveys the crowded density of the composition, but, since his knowledge of the work probably derived from monochrome engravings, it distorts its colour values. There is nothing "prismatic" about "heaven's choired daughters"—the same blue encircles both the passion instruments above and the damned souls on their way to Hades. Possibly the poet's sense of a rainbow was prompted

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by the arches that converge on the trompe-l'oeil corbel supporting the prophet Jonah, an illusion that reactivates the storm and light-shaft imagery at the start of the poem. As a result the damned become a falling shower ("downdashed"), which coinage acts as an antiphon to the orderly massing of "choired." The last is a rare participial neologism for which the OED lemma makes provision but fails to illustrate with a sample, and it hints at that terraced disposition of the blessed, viz, Dante's "multifoliate rose."8 The turmoil has been tempered by the balance of the design, which renders the apocalypse in a static amber, unlike the febrile and driven chaos of Beddoes's own "Dies Irae" poems. Most ecphrases concentrate on the object at hand, but this one goes further, locating the mural within its architectural frame. More than a century later, Thom Gunn would follow Beddoes's example, his account of a Caravaggio picture ("In Santa Maria del Popolo") also moving from the church to the object within: Waiting for when the sun an hour or less Conveniently oblique makes visible The painting on one wall of this recess By Caravaggio, of the Roman School, I see how shadow in the painting brims With a real shadow . . .9

If we were to read the "Stanzas Written in Switzerland" (p. 155) in isolation from their reworking into the "Lines Written in Switzerland," we might be forgiven for thinking that they constitute a threnody along the lines of "Lament for the Makars," for Beddoes, as Dunbar before him, has noted how prominent poetic voices have been silenced in quick succession: He has done petuously devour, The noble Chaucer, of makaris flour, The monk of Bery, and Gower, all thre: Timor mortis conturbat me.10

There can be little doubt that he also drew inspiration from the unbreathing landscape of Keats's Hyperion. Compare . . . No stir of air was there, Not so much life as on a summer's day Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass, But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest. A stream went voiceless by . . . (p. 221)

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with the proemial stanza: Who lonely strays in England's oaky forest Meets silence drear the windless leaves among Since thou no more Aeolian breathings pourest O'er Ocean's crowned isle, Spirit of Song. Silence unknown to Druid-spectre hoarest Since Merlin bid thy disenchanted tongue Above the nations, as a bird on high O'er Alpine tops, arouse A cataractous burst of ceaseless melody. (p. 155)

Beddoes summons up a vision of England when human settlement found tenuous purchase in an uninterrupted forest of oak, a time when history and myth were interinvolved (hence the presence of Merlin in the picture). When he revised the stanzas into blank verse, he set up a dialectic opposition between the factories of Manchester and Liverpool and a preindustrial idyll, but here it figures without that foil. The landscape is rendered poetic by something akin to the ruach or wind that in Gen. 1.1 moves "upon the face of the waters," here choosing to inhabit a crowned island. The latter's marine isolation guarantees its freedom, and the "Druid-spectre" functions as an avatar of the bard who speaks truth to the power of Edward I in Gray's poem. "Alpine tops" furthermore connect the liberty of England with Switzerland, a premise borrowed from another Gray poem, "The Progress of Poesy." Its muses, likewise scorning the "pomp of tyrant-power," seek out the "sea-encircled coast" of Albion. "Aeolian breathings" would seem to figure the ruleless freedom of English verse—one remembers that "Late, very late, correctness grew our care"12—its acolytes all prototypes of the Shelley who cried "Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is."13 Merlin wasn't a poet, but, as a mage, he represents the incantatory aspect of the craft. The internationalist destiny of England as champion of freedom, whether political or poetic ("Since Merlin bid thy disenchanted tongue / Above the nations . . . arouse / A . . . burst of . . . melody") might have been suggested by Le Morte d'Arthur: Also Merlin made the Round Table in tokening of the roundness of the world, for by the Round Table is the world signified by right. For all the world, christian and heathen, repair unto the Round Table, and when they are chosen to be of the fellowship of the Round Table, they think them more blessed, and more in worship, than if they had gotten half the world; . . . 14

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At the start of the next stanza Beddoes deploys the same elegiac "ubi sunt" topos that we find in Herbert's "Whitsunday" ("Where is that fires which once descended / On thy Apostles?"15): Where are the masters of the magic word Who reallumed the Promethean blaze And let old Ocean out with all his herd On the Atlantic sufferer's front to gaze?

The neologism "reallume," which portmanteaus the frequentative "re" with "illume" and "allude," also forms the word "real" across the prefixal division, attributing to the second-generation Romantics the capacity to realize an intensity of enchantment ("magic word") that the Olympian order of the eighteenth century had tried to suppress. Hence the reversion to the older Titans, England seen as a Prometheus tortured for rebelling against the edicts of neo-classicism. That, at any rate, is how I interpret the reference to the "Atlantic sufferer," though Beddoes might simply mean the Atlantic's perpetual assault upon the coast of England. Oceanus, attended by his manifold entourage, represents a return to fecundity, for Book XIV of The Iliad describes him as "the forbear of the gods."16. Remembering the "sublime" obscurity of Gray's Pindaric odes, Beddoes becomes highly allusive, and gives only tenuous clues about the identity of the makars that he is mourning. One must assume that since Byron excelled his Romantic confreres in satire, his is the "sharp sword" that "Flashed and fell deep, unparried by amaze." It's not entirely clear whom Beddoes has next in mind. The metonyms of "heath and lake" suggest Canto VI of "The Lay of the Last Minstrel"— "Land of brown heath and shaggy wood, / Land of the mountain and the flood"17—and so does the mediaevalism of "lady's bower and castled tower and hall," but when one recalls the reactionary politics of Scott and the fact that his verse had had little impact on Beddoes's, the lament might centre instead on Keats. The dreary setting of "La Belle Dame Sans Merci"—"the sedge has wither'd from the lake" (p. 350)—seems to inform the "heath and lake," and the concluding hexameters of the first two stanzas hint at the Spenserian design of "The Eve of St. Agnes." By the same token, the latter's "music, yearning like a God in pain" (p. 196) might have prompted "longings musical," and its "shadows haunting faerily" (p. 196) the "fairy-footed, dancing thoughts." No doubt about the next makar of the lament since Beddoes supplies his name, though he mistakes the site of the drowning (the Ligurian Sea and not the Aegean). However, the error might have been deliberate, the poet wanting, like Arnold after him, to invoke an Attic emblem for "the turbid ebb and flow / Of human misery"

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("Dover Beach," p. 402). The sea's indifference toward the precious life it subsumes resembles blind apathy of Britain toward its prophetic son: "Hear, ye deaf; and look, ye blind, that ye may see" (Isa. 42.18). As in stanza one, the use of the adjective "Alpine" establishes the sublime nature of Shelley's gift, but also connects his passionate espousal of liberty with Swiss democracy, a connection that goes back via Goldsmith to Schiller: Though poor the peasant's hut, his feasts though small, He sees his little lot the lot of all; Sees no contiguous palace rear its head To shame the meanness of his humble shed;18

Notwithstanding his scepticism about an afterlife, Beddoes enthrones his idol in a pantheon headed by Homer—"Old Goethe's darling." It might be a place of darkness, but a benign Mediterranean darkness such as Byron hymns in "She Walks in Beauty" ("like the night / Of cloudless climes and starry skies"19). By shifting tone toward the jocular, Beddoes impairs the lament's dignity to some extent: "Old Goethe's darling, where the night is Grecian / In some Elysium pets his Houri-syren." Perhaps he planned to reshape the whole, remoulding the threnody into a "session poem" along the lines of those by Suckling and Leigh Hunt. The slippage in the diction might owe something to the latter's, invested as it is with the "'sessional' device of provocation."20 Just as Hunt had turned Apollo into a city wastrel—"T'other day, as Apollo sat pitching his darts / Through the clouds of November, by fits and by starts"21—so Homer caresses a siren as though she were a London barmaid, and gossips with Rabelais about England's decision to exclude Byron from the Poets' Corner. This might have struck Beddoes as a miscalculation and caused him to abandon the poem. Later, however, he picked it up again, reshaping it on this occasion into a dignified blank-verse "succession poem" along the lines of Gray's "Progress of Poesy," which also contains a poetic roll call. There, however, the authors have been ranked into an apostolic succession, transmitting from generation to generation the sacred flame of poetry and liberty (indivorcible entities in Gray's scheme of things). "The Progress of Poesy" ends with the poet's self-presenting as the unworthy heritor of the tradition— Oh! lyre divine, what daring spirit Wakes thee now? Though he inherit Nor the pride nor ample pinion, That the Theban eagle bear22

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—and even though the "Lines Written in Switzerland" were also left unfinished, Beddoes seems to have followed Gray's example, offering himself in turn as the presumptive successor to the Romantic poets (in default of any other candidate). The poem begins with the earlier druidical oak forest, but soon strikes out in a new direction: What silence drear in England's oaky forest, Erst merry with the redbreast's ballad song Or rustic roundelay! No hoof-print on the sward, Where sometime danced Spenser's equestrian verse Its mazy measure! Now by pathless brook Gazeth alone the broken-hearted stag, And sees no tear fall in from pitiful eye Like kindest Shakespeare's. . . . (p. 156)

Instead of focussing on recent losses to English verse, Beddoes offers a conspectus of literary history ranging from the mediaeval ballad (its spontaneity and artlessness figured by the "native Wood-notes wild"23 of a robin), the Spenserian romance (imaged through a stylized joust à la Faerie Queene) and Shakespearian drama, encapsulated by Jaques's commentary on the wounded stag in As You Like It 2.1.33 ff. Silence obtains in the forest because nobody has arisen to succeed them, Shakespeare having died in the seventeenth century, whereas the adverb "now" locates the speaker in the nineteenth, where he confronts the same lacuna that prompted Gray to offer his own candidacy. However, he holds off for a while, reminding us that the three elements he adduces as essentials of the English tradition (ballad, romance and verse drama) had had distinguished practitioners until very recently—so distinguished as to have prompted his own retirement from the scene. Using the editorial "we" of public commentary, he records the successive deaths of Keats and Shelley as though he had witnessed them himself: We, who marked how fell Young Adonais, sick of vain endeavour Larklike to live on high in tower of song; And looked still deeper thro' each others' eyes At every flash of Shelley's dazzling spirit, Quivering like dagger on the breast of night, That seemed some hidden natural light reflected Upon time's scythe, a moment and away: Darkness unfathomable over it.

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Although Beddoes takes over Shelley's symbolic name for Keats—a fusion of "Adonai" and "Adonis"—he rejects the cause of death adduced in his elegy: "The savage criticism of his Endymion, which appeared in the Quarterly Review, produced the most violent effect on his susceptible mind."24 Rather, he projects Keats as having exhausted himself by the sustained intensity of his verse, "tower" here being not the "turris eburnea" of fin de siècle poetry but rather the act of towering above the earth in energetic flight. The image hints regret that the poet failed fully to engage with the human experience playing out far below him. No comparable criticism is made of Shelley, however. His verse, in Beddoes's view, has intensified human empathy, and allowed the members of the human race to participate more feelingly and more objectively in their communal lives: "And looked still deeper thro' each others' eyes." The speaker then moves to an inventive (and mystifying) paraphrase of a passage from A Midsummer Night's Dream: Brief as the lightning in the collied night, That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth, And, ere a man hath power to say 'Behold!', The jaws of darkness do devour it up: (1.1.145-48)

Like Lysander's lightning, Shelley's also penetrates, and the same time succumbs to, the darkness of the world, its quivering a measure of the force with which it has struck home, as when, in the Aeneid, Laocoön throws a spear into the wooden horse: "stetit illa [hasta] tremens" [The spear stood quivering].25 But at the same time it flashes on that night like a resplendent brooch, momentarily ennobling the obscurity it attempts to enlighten. Beddoes implies that Shelley's message of social equality transfers the levelling power of Death to this side of the grave, a fleeting apprehension of a natural order that unjust human structures have distorted or wholly occluded. His democratic message vanishes into "Darkness unfathomable," which engulfs it as the waves of the Ligurian Sea had swallowed up its messenger. Perhaps "reflected light" refers to the false dawn, a phenomenon caused by the sun's illuminating cosmic dust in a premature semblance of the day. Shelley's message, temporarily suppressed, will also rise and irradiate the world, as a false dawn is succeeded by the true. Having recorded the actual passing of great poets, Beddoes now documents the living death of the oldest amongst them. Aldous Huxley's account of how the later Wordsworth chose to stay "comfortably at home with a man-made, and, therefore, thoroughly comprehensible system, rather than a poet adventuring for adventure's sake through the mysterious

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world revealed by his direct and undistorted intuitions"26 explains the disappointment his career occasioned among the radical Romantics—a disappointment shared by Beddoes after them We, who have seen Mount Rydal's snowy head Bound round with courtly jingles; list so long Like old Orion for the break of morn, Like Homer blind for sound of youthful harp; And, if a wandering music swells the gale, 'Tis some poor solitary heartstring burst.

A contre rejet forces us to reread "Mount Rydal"—first construed as the mountain near the poet's home—as an antonomastic metonym, the remote sublimity of its snow an image of an old man's hair (and potential token, therefore, of senility), and its huge, unbindable peak scaled down to a head that can be encompassed by jingles. The last figure as the bells on a jester's cap, suggesting that Wordsworth has become the tame fool of Reaction. Those "jingles" also mock the fatuity of his Laureate verse (at least as Beddoes views it) if we construe them to mean inane doggerel. Whether read as fool's cap or foolscap, they displace the laurel wreath of Apollo with the badge of foolery. That much seems clear, but then Beddoes lapses into obscurity. An emphatic (and probably corrupt) semicolon separates the verb "list" from the two potential subjects that could govern it, viz, "We" and "head," the speaker and his subject. Either it is a self-directed imperative—"You, Beddoes, list" or it is the indicative verb of a noun clause governed by "have seen"—"We have seen Wordsworth list." The latter seems to me the preferable reading, notwithstanding the fact that punctuation gets in the way. The laureate's "snowy head," after all, invites comparison with "old Orion," whose name ("mountaindweller") picks up Mount Rydal, and if Homer be the one who yearns for a "youthful" harp, he would add a note of depletion to a tableau of age—all three men looking back with nostalgia to a vanished time of energy. Wordsworth, Beddoes suggests, has been reduced to occasional elegiac pieces, the function of a hopeless hankering after lost power. If Britain be to all intents and purposes without a bard, France is not. But who is the fiery Frenchman in question? Victor Hugo, perhaps, whom schoolbooks, according to Anthony Hartley, present as a "garde-national épique"?27 His chameleonic shift from right-wing monarchist to advanceguard radical encompassed the dominant currents of French life and culture, and could therefore be said to have moved his "nation's heart, as ocean 'neath the moon." By contrast, England has reduced and regulated its arts to mere commerce, as in Our Mutual Friend: "Literature; large

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print, respectively descriptive of getting up at eight, shaving close at a quarter-past, breakfasting at nine, going to the City at ten, coming home at half-past five, and dining at seven."28 Taking two hubs of the country's industrial revolution, Beddoes suggests that Liverpool imports disease and plague in exchange of the cotton goods it exports to the colonies, and that the sea-power that underpins England's economic supremacy and which indirectly fuels the industrial revolution has issued in a hell on earth: Be proud of Manchester Pestiferous Liverpool, Ocean-Avernus, Where bullying blasphemy, like a slimy lie, Creeps to the highest church's pinnacle, And glistening infects the light of heaven.

This represents Beddoes's exilic view of his birthplace, one strikingly at odds with the bouncy (mock?) patriotism of "The Comet": The eye of the demon on ALBION was turned, And, viewing the happy, with envy he burned; He snarled at the churches, the almshouse he cursed, Till hate of their virtue his silence had burst: 'Why waves yonder harvest? why glitters yon tower? 'My hate they despise, and they scoff at my power.['] (p. 51)

There a church tower had glittered with moral probity, here it glistens with slime. The pointed transition from pestiferous Liverpool to the national church reminds us that the "Reformers read their Old Testaments and . . . became those detestable Puritans to whom we owe, not merely Grundyism and Podsnappery, but also (as Weber and Tawney have shown) all that was and still is vilest, cruellest, most anti-human in the modern capitalist system."29 The slimy pinnacle recalls both the corruption of "Every blackening church"30 in Blake's "London," and its "bullying blasphemy" the indictment that Pope made of the Monument: "Where London's column, pointing at the skies, / Like a tall bully, lifts its head, and lyes."31 Prophetic arraignment accordingly shifts to Juvenalian satire, and tapinosis turns the allegorical Britannia (whose first likeness was taken from one of Charles II's many mistresses) into a wretched charade, the vaunted trappings of empire nothing more than insular bourgeois comfort. Although slavery had been abolished in the British empire in 1833, England continued to import cotton from the southern states of America, so Beddoes seats Britannia on a boll/ball that parodies the woolsack of the Lord Chancellor's office, and at the same time highlights the human exploitation from which her prosperity derives:

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O flattering likeness on a copper coin! Sit still upon your slave-raised cotton ball, With upright toasting fork and toothless cat: The country clown still holds her for a lion.

By sourcing this national symbol from a penny, the poet reminds us of Ovid's corrupt age of bronze, and (incidentally) anticipates a similar tableau in Our Mutual Friend: "Britannia, sitting meditating one fine day (perhaps in the attitude in which she is represented on the copper coinage)" (p. 244). Since she "sits still," she appears unwilling to embrace the dynamism of social (and aesthetic) revolution, the nation as static and worn as the rilievo image on a coin. The amateurishness of the tableau, as if staged in a provincial theatre, vanishes at a stroke, and an invocation wrenches the poem in a wholly new direction. Perhaps Beddoes had in mind the opening of "The Bard," where a mysterious prophetic voice ("Such were the sounds"—p. 184) echoes through a landscape as wild and mountainous as the one that he is about to sketch. Or perhaps he was thinking of "Kubla Khan," which also deals with prophecy in a context of cataracts and chasms ("And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far / Ancestral voices prophesying war"32): The voice, the voice! when the affrighted herds Dash heedless to the edge of craggy abysses, And the amazed circle of scared eagles Spire to the clouds, amid the gletscher clash When avalanches fall, nation-alarums— But clearer, though not loud, a voice is heard Of proclamation or of warning stern.

Although the owner of the voice is not disclosed, we can be reasonably certain that Beddoes intends it for his own, and while the content of his message remains undeclared, the indictment of the uncompassionate commercialism of Britain and the poem's pointed relocation to libertyloving Switzerland make it the vector of social (and, by implication, aesthetic) change. Leaving Britain behind as a static, tawdry dumbshow, Beddoes takes us into a world of vivid sound and movement. "The voice, the voice" functions as an implied optative, something along the lines of "O for a voice in the midst of this self-complacent silence." It is the cry of a prophet, in other words, and properly belongs in a sublime landscape. Hence the imagery of natural turmoil. The herds (presumably of chamois) that are agitated to the point of near-suicide, the gyre of geiers spiralling away from the troubled earth, the tocsins rising to the Alpine heights from the plains below, the blind destructiveness of glaciers as the ice breaks

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against itself, the rumbling of avalanches—all these amount to a soundtrack for sublimity. Yet they are not themselves the voice of revelation, but rather the precursors that define it in terms of what it is not, just as that of Yahweh emerges with an unexpected gentleness out of the Sturm und Drang of 1 Kings 19: 11 And, behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the LORD; but the LORD was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the LORD was not in the earthquake: 12 And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.

With his voice self-deprecatingly defined as being stern but not loud, Beddoes moots his tentative return to the world of verse—bardic, transcendent verse, that is, far removed from the annual- and keepsakefare that he had earlier reproached Procter for writing. Like Gray in "The Progress of Poesy," he is conscious of his shortcomings as the heritor of this great tradition, and the shade out of which he steps is the literary obscurity to which his medical studies have consigned him. But it also projects a sense of pastoral retirement, a vantage from which life can be soberly analysed, as it is in Virgil— "tantum inter densas, umbrosa cacumina, fagos" [among the thick beeches with their shady summits]33—and in Gray ("Where'er the oak's thick branches stretch / A broader, browner shade" ("Ode on the Spring," p. 50). The speaker's sojourn in this shade has purified his motive for returning— not a "vainglorious" thirst of popular acclaim, but the production of "thoughtful verse" that, like Shelley's, will strive to advance social transformation: Yet, if I tread out of the Alpine shade, And once more weave the web of thoughtful verse, May no vainglorious motive break my silence; If I have sate unheard so long, it was in hope That mightier and better might assay The potent spell to break, which has fair Truth Banished so drear a while from mouths of song. Though genius, bearing out of other worlds New freights of thought from fresh-discovered mines, Be but reciprocated love of Truth: Witness kind Shakespeare, our recording angel, Newton, whose thought rebuilt the universe, And Galileo, broken-hearted seer, Who like a moon attracted naturally,

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Kept circling round the central sun of Truth.

As long as poets tinkle out tea-table lyrics they will fall short of their vocation as "the unacknowledged legislators of the world,"34 a vocation open not only to poets but to all the redefiners and transfigurers of human knowledge. In Beddoes's view, the elegant formulae of Newton are just such vectors of poetry—a view that contrasts sharply with the attitude of those who thought that he "'had destroyed all the Poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to a prism'", and who drank "confusion to mathematics", a "popular toast for Wordsworth too, with his own doctrine of the 'meddling intellect.'"35 By foregrounding the great mathematician in this way, Beddoes stretches the function and nature of poetry to include the reinvention of the world and the dismantlement of perceptions that prevent its renovation. Shakespeare follows Newton with a serene, cryptoscientific detachment, producing a conspectus of all human experience in the same way that the "liber scriptus" of the "Dies Irae" (popularly presented as the work of a recording angel) "totum continetur"36; and finally Galileo enters the picture as a prophet nullified by rejection, a prophet rendered heart-sore by the incredulity of his audience, and beset with Elijah's sense of despair: "It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life" (1 Kings 19.4). At the same time that Beddoes presents the astronomer as a sage denied all honour "in his own country, and in his own house" (Matt. 13.57) he reminds us of the empirical nature of the work that he advanced against the ignorant argumenta ad auctoritatem of the church. He is the seer of actual heavenly bodies rather than a seer in the prophetic sense, the one who concerns himself primarily with immaterial things. One senses through the allusion to Shelley's address to the moon ("Wandering companionless / Among the stars that have a different birth"—p. 660) that Beddoes has reconstituted him in his own image (a man who took to his bedroom to avoid intercourse with relatives during his rare visits to England). The communal haunts of the keepsake and album readership enter the picture so as to underscore the prophetpoet's social isolation: Not in the popular playhouse, or full throng Of opera-gazers, longing for deceit; Not on the velvet day-bed, novel-strewn, Or in the interval of pot and pipe; Not between sermon and scandalous paper, May verse like this e'er hope an eye to feed on't.

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Grand opera was the rage of the primo ottocento, a form that centred above all on spectacle. One of its most popular embodiments, Meyerbeer's Robert le diable, was the first to simulate the effect of moonlight with gas, and bathed its spectral nuns in ersatz blue radiance. This "longing for deceit" suggests that the stage has become a place where the eye has been abused by factitious effects-mongering, the sole end of which (as in the case of the keepsake and annual) was superficial diversion. Beddoes probably knew that, in his life of Savage, Dr Johnson had referred to opera as an "exotick and irrational entertainment,"37 but he wouldn't have known that Wordsworth had levelled similar criticisms against the public appetite for spectacle in Book VII of The Prelude, for that had yet to be published. It distinguishes between the mimesis of high art ("By means refined attaining purest ends") and that of the panoramas that engrossed the London public ("imitations fondly made in plain / Confession of man's weakness and his loves"): At leisure, then, I viewed, from day to day, The spectacles within doors . . . . . . those sights that ape The absolute presence of reality, Expressing, as in mirror, sea and land, And what earth is, what she has to show38

Beddoes goes on to note how poetry has increasingly given way to fiction, and most especially to the silver-spoon confections of Disraeli and Lytton, hinted by the velvet daybed (recourse of idle society women) upon which belles-lettres have become belle-litter ("novel-strewn"). At the same time, lower down the social ladder, literature finds parity with the beer and tobacco with which shop-keepers and factory-managers entertain themselves. The juxtaposition of "sermon" with "scandalous paper" recalls the "ancient Maid" in The Rape of the Lock—"With store of Pray'rs for Mornings, Nights and Noons, / Her hand is fill'd; her Bosom with Lampoons" (p. 233). Having thus dismissed the British public as a "profanum vulgus" [uninitiate crowd], Beddoes follows Horace in directing his "carmina non prius audita" [songs not heard before]39—which is to say, songs not heard in Vauxhall, Covent Garden, St Paul's or Fleet Street—at a much reduced audience. All he asks of it is empathy, since his poetry speaks to those whom bereavement has partly unfitted for life: May verse like this e'er hope an eye to feed on't. But if there be, who, having laid the loved Where they may drop a tear in roses' cups,

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With half their hearts inhabit other worlds; If there be any—ah! were there but few— Who watching the slow lighting up of stars, Lonely at eve, like seamen sailing near Some island city where their dearest dwell, Cannot but guess in sweet imagining— Alas! too sweet, doubtful, and melancholy— Which light is glittering from their loved one's home: Such may perchance, with favourable mind, Follow my thought along its mountainous path. Now then to Caucasus, the cavernous.—

The synaesthesia of the feeding eye recalls "I Stood Tip-toe"—"There was wide wand'ring for the greediest eye, / To peer about upon variety" (Keats, p. 3)—but here it has developed the more solemn implication of a poetry centred on nurturement rather than frivolity. Once again, as in the "Dedicatory Stanzas," Beddoes recurs to the loss of Reich (or someone like him), and to the Platonic-Timaean idea of soul-enshelling stars with which that figure is associated. Unable to assent to the Christian doctrine of resurrection, he tries to find solace in a Greek alternative, though no doubt aware in his heart of hearts that it is equally untenable. Since the quotidian world becomes unbearable without the beloved, the survivor visits an imaginative space in which that fact is reversed, bringing the relief of temporary or partial escape like that in the "Ode to a Nightingale"). Another crucial source for the poem is Collins's "Ode to Evening," in which the speaker awaits the onset of the night as a devotee the advent of deity. Its adagio pace, its sense of reverent expectation, and its solitude all anticipate Beddoes's atmospheric lines. Compare "Who watching the slow lighting up of stars, / Lonely at eve" with As musing slow, I hail Thy genial loved return! For when thy folding star arising shows His paly circlet . . .40

As the speaker takes up his watch beneath the night sky, wondering which star is yoked to his beloved, he seems subliminally to think of the light burning across the Hellespont in the tale of Hero and Leander, hence the modulation to seamen on waters near their lit-up houses, a poignantly silent communication between bodies at once remote and close. But whereas the constellation of lights on an island would allow them roughly to locate their cherished homes, the night sky offers no certain point on

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which the speaker can centre his longings. The ambivalent run of adjectives from "sweet" to "melancholy" makes this plain. At the same time, however, that simile of the island town—a cluster of lights in a dark void—transfers some of its homeliness into the vacancies of space, the stars like windows that emit a domestic glow—"Which light is glittering from their loved one's home." In what direction Beddoes proposed to move the poem from this point onwards is anybody's guess, but it seems likely that he planned to revisit Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, for why otherwise would he have chosen briskly to set forth "to Caucasus, the cavernous" (p. 158)? The remaining fragments are too broken to throw much light on the enterprises to which they were intended to belong, but they both have interest. The first ends in a startling non sequitur: Does any lip of lady drop, like dew, Upon the sleeping youngling's pearly cheek? What silence ghastly.

How eccentric of Beddoes to liquefy the flesh of the mother's lip in this Dali-esque way, splashing it down upon her infant instead of planting a delicate kiss. But, as so often, the oddity and elusiveness of the conceit enriches the fragment with mystery. Anthony Hartley has praised the blurriness of Victor Hugo, and saluted the way he achieved "the feat of giving imprecision to the French language."41 English, with its rich and diverse word hoard, has never aspired to the rites of purification that French underwent in the seventeenth century, but Beddoes often matches Hugo in giving (superadded) imprecision to his already "imprecise" tongue. The dew image distracts us, but it also enlightens, encouraging an irrational short circuit between it and the "sleeping youngling's pearly cheek," impearled by the mother's kisses. The double "-ing" suffix of the noun phrase likewise offsets the clumsiness of the chime by enhancing the rhythmic shape of the juxtaposed iambs, and so enacts the rise and fall of the infant's breath. The second stray gobbet of the poem recalls Shakespeare's image of floral blamelessness—"look like th'innocent flower, / But be the serpent under't" (Macbeth 1.5.65-66): Yet who hath looked into the eye of truth And seen mankind after the will of nature, Should live the fair and innocent life of flowers.

Beddoes has also invoked Matt. 6.28—"Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin"—for just such an

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absence of toil and spinning would serve to redeem the Avernus of Manchester and Liverpool. By deleting the "nocent" serpent from underneath Lady Macbeth's flower, he also cancels the snake from the temptation myth of Genesis, substituting a perfectible "will of nature" for the idea of original sin. Human depravity, after all, is the key assumption behind the Protestant work ethic, and that in turn played an important part in the industrial revolution. The "will of nature" secularizes that cant theodicy—"the will of God"—so often used to "explain" atrocities. Huxley points out that for the English working classes the early years of the industrial epoch were years of unspeakable misery and degradation. Yet there was no revolution in England. For that we have largely to thank the Methodists. These singleminded revivalists of Christianity did more to preserve the stability of English institutions than all the Tory politicians. The greatest conservatives of the age were not the Wellesleys, but the Wesleys.42

At the same time, however, Beddoes's "will of nature" poses intellectual difficulties of its own, harking back to "eighteenth-century humanitarians, who started from the axiom that man in 'a state of nature' is virtuous and reasonable," and that there cannot be "sin in the Christian, or crime in the legal, sense of the word."43 Beddoes, blinded by his reverence for Shelley's and Godwin's Pelagianism, has set aside a good deal of evidence to the contrary that his scientific studies would have thrown in his face. The following "Epigram," while not obviously a fragment of the uncompleted poem, offers a corollary to the tableau of Britannia with toasting fork and aged cat: Drink, Britannia, Britannia, drink your Tea, For Britons, Bores and butter'd Toast; they all begin with B.

This contrafaction of "Rule Britannia" would have achieved an even more plosive alliteration if Beddoes had substituted "brew" for "drink." Many alcoholics entertain a passionate distaste for milk and water and an even greater hostility for those who don't share their aversion. Beddoes seems to have been no exception, for his intense animus against the "cups / That cheer but not inebriate"44 no doubt springs from the middle-class snugness they emblematize. The parody, made with a certain Continental detachment while the revolutions of 1848 were raging, stresses the selfish isolationism of Britain. And perhaps, by stressing the initial consonants of his triad, he is also tacitly inviting us to examine their tails, the S of "Britons, Bores" and the T of "Toast" containing a scatological hint of

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another word that begins with B (England's personification as John Bull), and ends on an excremental T. Cowper had conducted his tea-party behind closed shutters and drawn curtains, but any effort at concealment and selfish privacy can't escape the poet's prophetic gaze, as witness the distich inaccurately entitled "Reflexion": "Through robe and rib and muscle to heart's core / We see as stars through clear midnight." "Penetration" would have made a more apposite title than "Reflexion", since Beddoes offers a Röntgen vision of the human heart, unreflected and undeflected recalling 1 Sam. 16.7 ("for the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart"). The "robe" reference gives a Shakespearian turn to the apercu—"Robes and furred gowns hide all" (King Lear 4.6.163), but whom does Beddoes intend to encompass in "we"? Is it an editorial reference to the poet himself, asserting the prerogative of the satirist invectively to pierce "through / The body of country, city, court," as Jaques does in As You Like It 2.2.57-58—or is it the small "remnant" readership adumbrated in the "Lines Written in Switzerland," collectively gifted with a penetrating vision quite foreign to the purveyors of keepsake fodder? "The Phantom-Wooer" (p. 158) is one of the better known of Beddoes's poems, perhaps because Robert Frost used it as a point of departure in "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", a connection first made by Allan Danzig: The similarity of Frost's line and line three of Beddoes's stanza may be merely verbal; the two poets may quite independently have fashioned the phrases in question. But if we choose to see Frost's dark wood more than a starkly literal New England one, we would wish the echo to be deliberate.45

Unaware of this finding, Anna Taylor rediscovered it thirteen years later,46 and was challenged by a doubter—"Taylor's parallels are not unusual enough to constitute cogent proof of historical influence; they can more easily be explained in terms of coincidence"47—to whom she responded stoutly: I think that readers who listen to the two lines together—Frost's "The woods are lovely, dark and deep" and Beddoes' "Our bed is lovely, dark and sweet"—will be struck by the echoes, especially since both lines describe temptations that in Frost's poems are decisively, if reluctantly, rejected.48

The poem recycles several elements from earlier ones—"The Boding Dreams," which also deals in bedside phantoms; the "Dedicatory Stanzas'"

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a communication between star-souls and those they leave behind on earth; the discarded skull that holds new and alien life in "The Song that Wolfram Heard in Hell"; and the many lyrics that gloze Death as rest, including the "Lines Written at Geneva" and "Sibylla's Dirge." Beddoes has once again recurred to that crucial lost love (Reich?), transposing genders (as an early editor of the Shakespeare sonnets had done to deflect any homophobic judgements upon the poet), and vectoring his own dreams through those of the "lady fair": A ghost, that loved a lady fair, Ever in the starry air Of midnight at her pillow stood; And, with a sweetness skies above The luring words of human love, Her soul the phantom wooed. Sweet and sweet is their poisoned note, The little snakes of silver throat, In mossy skulls that nest and lie, Ever singing 'die, oh! die.' (pp. 158-59)

In the planctus of Lysander and Hermia (A Midsummer Night's Dream 1.1.135-36), one of the obstacles that skews the course of true love is "difference in blood"—"O cross! too high to be enthrall'd to low"—and a curious variant of which obtains between bloodless ghost and living lady, exalted spirit and earth-bound mortal. So fully does Beddoes inhabit the woman's consciousness—a good indication that it's a nonce vehicle for his own experience—that he fails to record her responses, displacing them with the speaker's own commentary. Only the snakes and the skulls of the refrain hint at the danger of the suicide to which the woman is being urged, but it's almost eclipsed by their beguilingness. The fact that the poet took his own life a short while after writing this poem offers persuasive extra-textual proof of its having externalized a private dilemma. By rephrasing the conventional "starry sky" as "starry air," Beddoes produces a sense of luminous constellations hovering around the wooer. This ambiguates the spatial location of the poem, which seems to transpire half in the bedroom, and half in stellar space. He enhances this sense through the comparative phrase ("skies above") which, while it functions as a superlative, bleeds into "starry sky" at the same time. The adverb "ever," associated with that sky, also figures in the refrain, where it stresses the endless recurrence of an idée fixe. It would seem on the evidence of this that Beddoes repeatedly dreamt of his lost love, dreams as happy and vivid as Caliban's, so that when he waked, he "cried to dream again" (The Tempest 3.2.1441). If that be so, the burden must be seen as

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discharging a choric function derived from his analysis of those dreams and his yearning for the death they evoke. A "mossy skull" has no obvious connection a "lady fair," and suggests instead the weathered cranium of the aging poet. It would be inappropriate, therefore, to think of emeraldcoloured bryophytes; grey, weathering lichen better fits the bill. While it's certainly the case that the snakes, like the tempter in Genesis, are insidious—Nadine Gordimer called one of her stories "The Soft Voice of the Serpent"49—Beddoes's remain manageably small, their mellifluousness and decorative markings (silvered as in Keats's Endymion50) rendering them attractive, and their poison—agent of welcome death—diffuses through music rather than through fangs. Their habits, moreover, are notably domestic and passive, and the reduplication of "sweet" in "Sweet and sweet" produces a sense of overwhelming satiety, the same satiety that, in Keats's "Ode on Melancholy," turns "to Poison while the beemouth sips" (p. 220). The second stanza begins by echoing the promise of resurrection in 1 Cor. 15.53—"For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality": Young soul put off your flesh, and come With me into the quiet tomb, Our bed is lovely, dark, and sweet; The earth will swing us, as she goes, Beneath our coverlid of snows, And the warm leaden sheet.

"Put on" is the corollary of "put off," and if I am right in suggesting that the "lady fair" stands for Beddoes himself, the flesh in question will be tired and slack, prematurely aged by drink and tobacco, whereas the pristine soul within its envelope seeks release in death and possible reunion with the beloved. One of the oldest euphemisms for death is sleep, as when Roman Catholics talk about the "dormition" rather than the death of the BVM, and when, in the pastoral elegy "He Was," it becomes a voluntary act of hibernation: "Until he went in the dead of fall / To the drowsy underground."51 Beddoes goes one step further than Wilbur, however, cancelling the implicit loneliness of hibernation with a sense of sexual communion. He does this by hinting Marlowe's cletic pastoral— "Come live with me and be my Love, / And we will all the pleasures prove"52—and invoking the happiness of an epithalamion: "Our bed is lovely, dark, and sweet." Even so, "dark" strikes a doubtful note. It pushes the wedding song in the direction of a dirge—the beginnings of a Liebestod. Beddoes then superinduces another generic element—the

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berceuse—which turns the wedded couple into sleeping infants, as it were rolled "round in earth's diurnal course, / With rocks, and stones, and trees" (Wordsworth, p. 149): "The earth will swing us, as she goes." Snow becomes a comfortable counterpane, and lead develops an uncharacteristic warmth. These dangerous but beguiling derangements of experience enhance the ambivalent tone of the refrain: "Dear and dear is their poisoned note." The adjustment of "sweet" to "dear" suggests a growing attachment, as if, like Cleopatra, the woman were about to take the snakes to her bosom. However, "dear" can also mean "costly," suggesting that the price of life is a high one to pay for an invitation that might prove to be as phantomic as the wooer that issues it. The "Last Fragments" are disjecta membra, one of which clearly originates in the "Lines Written in Switzerland," though it has been detached from the others without authorial sanction, and, given a spurious title "On Himself," made over as an epitaph: Poor bird, that cannot ever Dwell high in tower of song: Whose heart-breaking endeavour But palls the lazy throng. (p. 160)

The "tower of song" here is not the "turris eburnea"53 of the "Litaniae Lauretanae Beatae Mariae Virginis," which is to say, the tower of reclusion into which the Parnassians and their English emulators withdrew for the sake of "L'art pour l'art." As in the "Lines from Switzerland," it signifies a vigorous, persisted attempt at flight, broaching heights of poetry to which the indolent keepsake-reading public can't begin to aspire. In Beddoes's view, Keats didn't die from unkind reviews, but from the exhaustion attendant on loading "every rift"54 with ore. Larks might spurn the earth when they sing, but they can't do so ad infinitum: "Young Adonais, sick of vain endeavour / Larklike to live on high in tower of song." "On Himself" can't be about Beddoes therefore, since he failed to reach the first rank of poets, dissipating his creative energy instead of focussing it, and choosing a field of study that stunted his imagination. That was the diagnosis he himself presented in the lines he wrote for the Clifton Album, and it has nothing in common with the reason supposedly adduced here. Keats's effort was "heart-breaking" partly because the public's cold reception of his efforts caused him pain, but more because, in Beddoes's own mythologized construction of his death, the very effort of poetry depleted his strength. Two other "terminal" fragments invite commentary. The Italian sonnet manqué that seems to have been written, if not in articulo mortis, then

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very close to the point at which Beddoes chose to take his life. It's a stocktaking poem in the manner of Milton's Sonnet XIX, which also begins in darkness and despair—"When I consider how my light is spent, / Ere half my days in this dark world and wide."55 But whereas the Puritan's sense of election and providential purpose develops into calm acceptance, Beddoes's scepticism denies him that resolution: I am bewildered—utterly astray Within the doubt-brakes of obscurest Thought, Whereunto at last I have been brought Thro' all diversity of time & way Not blindfold, unaware [& in dismay Up from my used haunts suddenly caught By some strange Doubt, pledgling of Chance &—] (p. 159)

Beddoes's decision to write a sonnet must have arisen from a rage for order, an attempt to control his mental chaos by the most challenging and highly-wrought of lyric forms. His futile speculations about the interface of flesh and spirit—the raison d'être of medical studies—was the cause of that chaos. To depict it, he turned to the opening tercets of the Inferno, which he would have known in Cary's translation: In the midway of this our mortal life, I found me in a gloomy wood, astray Gone from the path direct: and e'en to tell, It were no easy task, how savage wild That forest, how robust and rough its growth, Which to remember only, my dismay Renews, in bitterness to far from death.56

Unlike Dante, however, Beddoes "noeticizes" his allegory, so that the forest becomes a mental entity. He book-ends the concrete vector ("brakes") with two abstract tenors ("doubt" and "Thought", the capital of the latter providing a further layer of abstraction, as though it were the Platonic idea of thought itself). Instead of Cary's unremarkable "gloomy," he opts for the superlative degree of "obscure," the meaning of which bifurcates as "difficult to construe" (which connects with "Thought") and to the Latin signification, "dark." This also provides a glimpse of Cowper's "Castaway," another poem that tries to get a handle on spiritual confusion: Obscurest night involved the sky, Th' Atlantic billows roar'd. When such a destin'd wretch as I, Wash'd headlong from on board,57

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The helplessness of Cowper's victim ("destin'd" removes the capacity of choice, as befits the Calvinist scheme of things) has prompted the helplessness of the passive voice: "I have been brought." The statement suggests an epibaterion or arrival poem, as when Catullus reaches his brother's tomb— "Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus / advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias" [Wandering through many countries and over many seas I come, my brother, to these sorrowful exsequies]58—but Beddoes's version of "vectus" (literally, "I have been carried"), instead resolving the situation, issues in a bewilderment made the more poignant by the speaker's sense of having been on the wrong track ("Not blindfold, unaware"). His reasoning has taken on a life of its own, and driven him to certain conclusions will he nill he. "Up from my used haunts suddenly caught / By some strange Doubt" parodies the translation of Ganymede to Olympus, and also the rapture in 1 Thess. 4.17: "Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air." The basis of the doubt behind this parody-transport would probably have been defined more closely if the poem had been finished. Perhaps it was the creative misgiving that besets even the greatest of artists (Tchaikovsky, for example), or perhaps the futility of his medical studies and the quasi-mystical direction in which he pressed them. The brokenness and hesitancy of the formulation enhances the anguish of the poem rather in the way that the incomplete state of Michelangelo's Prisoners heightens the anguish of figures "tragically oppressed by the ugly material in which they seem to fight to free themselves."59 Also worthy of remark is the self-standing simile, not unlike those that Beddoes tossed off during the Southampton summer with Kelsall—a time of carefree, youthful confidence: Who walks upon ye dew with step less loud, Than ye fed wind quittg ye full blown rose, Whose flusht leaves scorn to waver as he goes?

(p. 159)

The source for this conceit is Book VII of The Aeneid— illa vel intactae segetis per summa volaret gramina nec teneras cursu laesisset aristas, vel mare per medium fluctu suspensa tumenti ferret iter celeris nec tingueret aequore plantas. [She might have flown o'er the topmost blades of unmown corn, nor in her course have bruised the tender ears; or sped her way o'er mid sea, poised above the swelling wave, nor dipped her feet in the flood.]60

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—but that has been worked up most imaginatively. By placing the simile within an interrogatory frame, Beddoes recalls the challenging adunata of legend and fairy tale. The answer, given the impossible level of delicacy set by the challenge, is clearly "no one." Since "dew" implies the presence of herbage, and since footsteps cushioned by vegetation are largely silent, one leaps to the superlative degree, trying to trace the movement of the wind on a windless summer's day as it exits a rose without any "proof" of departure. Beddoes has superimposed upon this filigree image a contrapuntal idea of sexual consummation. The flushed condition of the flower recalls the sexual congress of "The Eve of St Agnes," both at Porphyro's conception of his plan ("Sudden a thought came like a fullblown rose, / Flushing his brow"—p. 199) and at its actualization ("he arose, / Etheral, flush'd, and like a throbbing star"—p. 205). The fact that the rose "scorn[s] to waver" suggests a Madeline-like passivity throughout the enterprise, submissively fixed in relation to the vagrant, invisible wind. In Scenes of Clerical Life, George Eliot remarks of a character that she "had that enduring beauty which belongs to pure majestic outline and depth of tint. Sorrow and neglect leave their traces on such beauty, but it thrills us to the last, like a glorious Greek temple, which, for all the loss it has suffered from time and barbarous hands, has gained a solemn history, and fills our imagination the more because it is incomplete to the sense."61 I can think of no more fitting epigraph for this epilogue, which closes my survey of Beddoes’s lyric verse—verse partly defaced by sorrow and neglect, but noble and vivid even so.

NOTES

Introduction 1

Arthur Symons, "Thomas Lovell Beddoes" in Figures of Several Centuries (London: Constable and Company, 1916), p. 124. 2 Alan Halsey, A Skeleton Key to Death's Jest-Book. (Belper: Thomas Lovell Beddoes Society, 1995). 3 Michael Bradshaw, Resurrection Songs: The Poetry of Thomas Lovell Beddoes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 4 Ute Berns, Science, Politics and Friendship in the Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes (Newark: Unversity of Delaware Press, 2012). 5 Daniel Karlin, "On Being Second-Rate: The Skeleton Art of Thomas Lovell Beddoes," The Yearbook of English Studies; 36.2 (2006): 36. 6 Christopher Ricks, "Thomas Lovell Beddoes: A Dying Start," in The Force of Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 140. 7 Thomas Lovell Beddoes, The Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ed. and intro. H. W. Donner (London: Oxford University Press, 1935). Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 8 John Forster, "From The Examiner, 27 September, 1851" in Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Plays and Poems of Thomas Lovell Beddoes (above, note 4), p. lxxiv. 9 Geoffrey Wagner, "Centennial of a Suicide: Thomas Lovell Beddoes," Horizon 113 (1949): 418. 10 Eleanor Wilner, Gathering the Winds: Visionary Imagination and Radical Transformation of Self and Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), p. 73. 11 Ezra Pound, "Beddoes and Chronology" in Selected Prose 1909-1965, ed. and intro. William Cookson (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), p. 351. 12 Royall H. Snow, Thomas Lovell Beddoes: Eccentric and Poet (New York: Covici and Friede, 1928), p. 100. 13 Jon Lundin, "T. L. Beddoes at Gottingen," Studia Neophilologica 43 (1971): 494. 14 William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Balladsin D. J Enright and Ernst de Chickera (eds.), English Critical Texts 16th Century to 20th Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 180. 15 Robert Gittings, John Keats (1968; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 210. 16 Edmund Blunden, "Beddoes and his Contemporaries" in Votive Tablets (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1931), p. 294. 17 Graham Robb, Victor Hugo (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), p. 538.

420

Notes

18

Northrop Frye, A Study of English Romanticism (1968; rpt. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984), p. 52. 19 Geoffrey Wagner, "Centennial of a Suicide: Thomas Lovell Beddoes." Horizon 113 (1949): 430. 20 Snow, (above, note 11), p. 103. 21 Alan Halsey, "Thomas Lovell Beddoes: A Reconsideration," Agenda 37 (1999): 250. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 22 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, ed. Elisabeth Stopp, intro. Peter Hutchinson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), p. 58. 23 Letter L (To Revell Phillips), The Letters of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ed. with notes by Edmund Gosse (London: Elkin Mathews & John Lane, 1894), p. 262. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 24 Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (London: Caxton Publishing Company, no date), p. 65n.

Chapter One: "Juvenilia" 1 Thomas Lovell Beddoes, The Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ed. and intro. H. W. Donner (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. xxiii. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 2 Michael Bradshaw, Resurrection Songs: The Poetry of Thomas Lovell Beddoes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), p. 6. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 3 G. R. Potter, "Did Thomas Lovell Beddoes Believe in the Evolution of Species?" Modern Philology 1 (1923): 92. 4 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Die Zauberflöte Oper in Zwei Aufzügen Text von Emanuel Schikaneder. KV 620. Nach dem Autograph revidiert und mit Einführung versehen von Hermann Abert (Leipzig: Edition Peters, no date), p. 77. 5 Thomas Gray, William Collins and Oliver Goldsmith, The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman, 1969), p. 223. 6 Hymns Ancient & Modern Revised (London: William Clowes, no date), p. 56. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 7 Charles Dickens, Master Humphrey's Clock and A Child's History of England, intro. Derek Hudson (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 152. 8 John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merrit Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957), p. 224. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 9 Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, intro. Lionel Trilling (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 3. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 10 Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, 2 vols. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), 2:16. 11 John Donne, The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 72. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference.

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John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale," Poetical Works, ed. H. W. Garrod (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 207. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 13 Philip Sidney, "An Apology for Poetry" in D. J Enright and Ernst de Chickera (eds.), English Critical Texts 16th Century to 20th Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 8. 14 Ovid, Metamorphoses, tr. Frank Justus Miller, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1916), 1:2&4. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 15 William Blake, Blake: The Complete Poems: Second Edition, ed. W. H. Stevenson (1971; rpt. and rev. London: Longman, 1989), p. 215. 16 Dante, Paradiso in La commedia divina, 3 vols., tr. John D. Sinclair (1935; rpt. London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 3:436-37. 17 John Dryden, "A Song for St Cecilia's Day," The Poems and Fables of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 422. 18 H. W. Donner, Thomas Lovell Beddoes: The Making of a Poet (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1935), p. 76. 19 John Haydn Baker, "'Georgium Sidus': Thomas Lovell Beddoes and the Discovery of Uranus," Notes and Queries 49.1 (March 2002): 46. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 20 Jaroslav PrĤšek (ed.), Dictionary of Oriental Literatures, 3 vols. (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 3:51. 21 B. Lewis, Ch. Pellat and J. Schacht (eds.), The Encyclopaedia of Islam: New Edition Prepared by a Number of Leading Orientalists, 19 vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1965), 2:779. 22 Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p. 108. 23 . J.-K. Huysmans, Against Nature, tr. Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959), p. 132. 24 Qtd in Steven J. Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 17941881 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985), p. 32 n. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 25 Giles Sparrow (ed.), The Solar System: Exploring the Planets and Their Moons from Mercury to Pluto and Beyond (San Diego, CA: Thunder Bay Press, 2006), p. 69. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 26 John Doyle Klier, Russia Gathers Her Jews: The Origins of the "Jewish Question" in Russia, 1772-1825 (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), p. 145. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 27 Alexander Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text with Selected Annotations, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1963), p. 515. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 28 John Keats, Poetical Works, ed. H. W. Garrod (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 242. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 29 Francis Bacon, Selected Writings of Francis Bacon, intro. Hugh G. Dick (New York: Random House, 1955), p 234.

422 30

Notes

Charles, Dickens, The Posthumous Papers of The Pickwick Club, intro. Bernard Darwin (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), p. 136. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 31 Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, tr. William Harris Stahl (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), p. 90. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 32 M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953; rpt. New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1958), p. 59. 33 Plotinus, The Six Enneads, tr. Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), pp. 150-51. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 34 William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 507. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 35 Maurice Hindle, "Nature, Power, and the Light of Suns: The Poetry of Humphry Davy." C:\Documents andSettings\Owner\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\CDQ3456R\Humphry Davy.htm 36 Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, tr. W. H. D. Rouse (London: William Heinemann, 1924), pp. 6-7. 37 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote de la Mancha, tr. Charles Jarvis, intro. Lester G. Crocker (New York: Pocket Books, 1957), p. 33. 38 John Lockhart, qtd in Ivor H. Evans (ed.), Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1870; rev. and rpt. London: Cassell, 1981), p. 73. 39 Robert Browning, Browning: A Selection, ed. W. E. Williams (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954), p. 215. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 40 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 129. 41 Leigh Hunt, The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt, ed. H. S. Milford (London: Oxford University Press, 1923), p. 119. 42 "The Progress of Poesy: A Pindaric Ode," (Gray, above, note 5), p. 173. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 43 "Burnt Norton," "Four Quartets" in T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1969), p. 172. 44 Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, ed. and intro. Andrew Sanders (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002), p. 839. 45 George Herbert, The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), p. 59. 46 Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop, intro. The Earl of Wicklow (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), pp. 114-15. 47 Richard Will, The Characteristic Symphony in the Age of Haydn and Beethoven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 27. 48 Friedrich Schlegel, Fragmente, selected Carl Enders (Leipzig: Im Insel-Verlag, no date), p. 22. 49 Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, intro. Marcus Stone (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 33.

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Including Poems and Versions of Poems Herein Published for the First Time, Edited with Textual and Bibliographical Notes, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London: Oxford University Press, 1912), p. 193. 51 Anne Harrex, "Death's Jest-Book and the German Contribution," Studia Neophilologica 39 (1967): 28. 52 Blake (above, note 15), p. 215. 53 Ovid, Metamorphoses, tr. Mary M. Innes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), pp. 173-74. 54 Collins (above, note 5), p. 437. 55 Frederick S. Boas (ed.), Five Pre-Shakespearean Comedies (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 233. 56 Iris Brooke, A History of English Costume (London: Methuen & Co, 1937), p. 165. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 57 George Gordon, Lord Byron, Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page, rev. John Jump (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 648. 58 Breviarium Romanum ex Decreto Sacrosancti Concilii Tridentini Restitutum S. Pii V Pontificis Maximi Jussu Editum Aliorumque Pontificum Cura Recognitum Pii Papae X Auctoritate Reformatum cum Nova Psalterii Translatione Pii Papae XII Jussu Edita, 4 vols. (Turin: Sumptibus et Typis Mame, 1949), 1:4. 59 A Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church Together with the Form and Manner of Making, Ordaining and Consecrating of Bishops, Priests and Deacons Set Forth by Authority for Use in the Church of the Province of South Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 6. 60 Afroditi P. Panaghis, "Alfarabi's Ideal City," Recovering Literature, 14 (1986): 89-90. 61 Samuel Butler, Hudibras, intro. Zachary Grey (London: Frederick Warne, No Date), p. 146. 62 John Keats, " Poetical Works, ed. H. W. Garrod (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 3. 63 Andrew Marvell, The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, rev. Pierre Legouis and Elsie Duncan-Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 1:28. 64 Herbert (above, note 44), p. 76. 65 Adrian Desmond, The Hot-Blooded Dinosaurs (London: Hutchinson, 1975), p. 12. 66 Martin Rees, "Three Centuries of Trinity Astronomy," The Fountain: Trinity College Newsletter 69 (Spring 2009): 9. 67 Hymns Ancient & Modern Revised (London: William Clowes, no date), p. 80. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 68 Coleridge (above, note 49), p. 298. 69 William Blake, Blake: The Complete Poems: Second Edition, ed. W. H. Stevenson (1971; rpt. and rev. London: Longman, 1989), p. 55. 70 Milton (above, note 8), p. 553. 71 Keats (above, note 60), p. 195.

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William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), p. 190. 73 Carl Maria von Weber, Oberon, Libretto Booklet for the DGG CD Recording: Stereo 419038-2, p. 73. 74 Essaka Joshua, "Thomas Lovell Beddoes and William John Hamilton," Newsletter of the Thomas Lovell Beddoes Society 11 (2005): 18.

Chapter Two: "The Improvisatore" 1

Lytton Strachey, "The Last Elizabethan" in Books & Characters: French & English (London: Chatto and Windus 1922), p. 198. 2 John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale," Poetical Works, ed. H. W. Garrod (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 208. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 3 Qtd. André Gide, Journals 1889-1949, tr., selected, ed. Justin O'Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 609n. 4 Matthew Lewis, The Monk, ed. Howard Anderson, intro. Emma McEvoy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 415. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 5 Gottfried Bürger, "Lenore," in H. G. Fiedler, H. G. (ed.), A Book of German Verse from Luther to Liliencron, Edited, with Introduction, Outlines of German Versification and Notes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916), p. 51. 6 "The Ministration of Publick Baptism of Infants To Be Used in the Church," in A Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church Together with the Form and Manner of Making, Ordaining and Consecrating of Bishops, Priests and Deacons Set Forth by Authority for Use in the Church of the Province of South Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 401. 7 Horace Walpole, Preface to the Second Edition, The Castle of Otranto With Sir Walter Scott's Introduction of 1821, intro. Marvin Mudrick (London: CollierMacmillan, 1963), p. 19. 8 Qtd. in Samuel Kliger, "The 'Goths' in England: An Introduction to the Gothic Vogue in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Discussion," Modern Philology 43.2 (1945): 116. 9 Ute Engel, "Neoclassical and Romantic Architecture in Britain" in Neoclassicism and Romanticism: Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, Drawings: 1750-1848, ed. Rolf Toman, tr. Paul Aston, Peter Barton and Eileen Martin (Cologne: Könemann, 2000), p. 28. 10 Charles, Dickens, The Posthumous Papers of The Pickwick Club, intro. Bernard Darwin (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), p. 400. 11 Hugh Honour, Romanticism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 157. 12 François-René de Chateaubriand, The Memoirs of Chateaubriand, tr. Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 209. 13 John Constable, "Last Lecture at Hampstead: On Landscape," The Discourses of John Constable, compiled and annotated by R. B. Beckett (Ipswich: Suffolk Records Society, 1970), p. 70.

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John Keats, "Ode to Psyche" (above, note 3), p. 212. Linda Nochlin, Realism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 65. 16 Matthew Arnold, The Poems of Matthew Arnold 1840-1867, intro. Arthur Quiller-Couch (London: Oxford University Press, 1909), p. 402. 17 Émile Legouis, Louis Cazamian and Raymond Las Vergnas, A History of English Literature, tr. Helen Douglas Irvine (London: J. M. Dent, 1926; rpt. and rev. 1967), p. 1154. 18 Qtd. in Kevin L. Morris, The Image of the Middle Ages in Romantic and Victorian Literature (London: Croom Helm, 1984), p. 13. 19 Prosper Merimée, Carmen and Columba, tr. and intro. Edward Marielle (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), pp. 121-22. 20 Percy A. Scholes (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Music, rev. John Owen Ward (1938; rev. and rpt. London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 760. 21 Alexander Rauch, "Neoclassicism and the Romantic Movement: Painting in Europe between Two Revolutions 1789-1848" in Neoclassicism and Romanticism: Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, Drawings: 1750-1848, ed. Rolf Toman, tr. Paul Aston, Peter Barton and Eileen Martin (Cologne: Könemann, 2000), p. 388. 22 Thomas Gray, William Collins and Oliver Goldsmith, The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman, 1969), p. 217. 23 Thomas Lovell Beddoes, The Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ed. and intro. H. W. Donner (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 41. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 24 Thomas Percy (ed.), Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 2 vols. (London: J. M. Dent, 1906), 1:14. 25 Andrew Marvell, The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, rev. Pierre Legouis and Elsie Duncan-Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 1:17. 26 Theocritus, The Poems of Theocritus, tr. and intro. Anna Rist (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), p. 30. 27 John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merrit Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957), p. 43. 28 Alexander Chalmers (ed.), The Works of the English Poets from Chaucer to Cowper, Including the Series, Edited, with Prefaces Biographical and Critical, by Dr Samuel Johnson: and the Most Approved Translations. The Additional Lives by A. Chalmers (London: J. Johnson, 1810) 2:417. 29 Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, A King and No King, ed. Lee Bliss (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p 104. 30 Edmund Spenser, Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt, intro. E. de Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 404. 31 Milton (above, note 27), p. 44. 32 James Thomson, The Seasons and The Castle of Indolence, ed. James Sambrook (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 135. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 15

426

Notes

33

Robert Bridges, "London Snow," in Herbert Read and Bonamy Dobrée (eds.), The London Book of English Verse (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1949), p. 379. 34 "Spring. The First Pastoral, or Damon," Alexander Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text with Selected Annotations, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1963), p. 124. 35 G. Mauger, J. Lamaison and M.-A. Hameau, Cours de langue et de civilisation françaises pour les 'étudiants de tous pays: Ouvrage couronné par l'Academie française. 1953; rev. and rpt. Paris: Librarie Hachette, 1967), p. 207. 36 Thomson, (above, note 32), p. 140. 37 John Dryden,"To my Dear Friend Mr. Congreve, on his COMEDY, call'd The Double-Dealer," The Poems and Fables of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 489. 38 Thomson, (above, note 32), p. 137. 39 Perhaps a poem by Beddoes's father suggested the effect of open fires in unventilated settings: Without a chimney Stood the little cabin. Full of warmth and smoke, It cherished its owner. The smoke he loved, Loved for the warmth's sake, though it bleared his eyes. This passage comes from "Domiciliary Verses," and is quoted in Donald G. Priestman, "Lyrical Ballads and Variant, Ashley 2250," English Language Notes 21 (1984):42. 40 Charles Dickens, "Night Walks" in The Uncommercial Traveller and Reprinted Pieces Etc., intro. Leslie Staples (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 129. 41 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, rev. Norman Davis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967) p. 4. 42 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, tr. and intro. Brian Stone (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959), p. 113. 43 William Wordsworth, "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads" in D. J Enright and Ernst de Chickera (eds.), English Critical Texts 16th Century to 20th Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 180. 44 Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Defence of Poetry" in D. J Enright and Ernst de Chickera (eds.) English Critical Texts 16th Century to 20th Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 251. 45 Keats (above, note 2), p. 210. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 46 Collins, (above, note 22), pp. 402-03. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 47 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), p. 190. 48 Peter Ure, "Two Elizabethan Poets: Samuel Daniel and Sir Walter Raleigh," in The Age of Shakespeare, ed. Boris Ford (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), p. 139.

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M. M. Reese, Introduction, Elizabethan Verse Romances, ed. M. M. Reese (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 4. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 50 Spenser (above, note 30), p. 137. 51 Robin Cormack, Byzantine Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 115. 52 Robert Browning, Browning: A Selection, ed. W. E. Williams (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954), p. 11. 53 Joseph Addison, The Works of Joseph Addison With Notes by Richard Hurd D.D. Lord Bishop of Worcester with Large Additions, Chiefly Unpublished, ed. Henry G. Bohn. 6 vols. (London: George Bell and Sons, 1902), 3:422. 54 Robert Herrick, The Poems of Robert Herrick, ed. L. C. Martin (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 119. 55 Thomas Hood, The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hood, ed Walter Jerrold (London: Oxford University Press, 1906), p. 112. 56 R. Larry Todd, Mendelssohn: A Life in Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 217. 57 Geoffrey Grigson, The Englishman's Flora Illustrated with Woodcuts from Sixteenth-Century Herbals (1958; London: Paladin, 1975), p. 361. 58 "The Hollow Men," T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1969), p. 85. 59 William Shakespeare, The Poems, ed. F. T. Prince (London: Methuen, 1960), p. 53. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 60 Marvell (above, note 24), 1:12. 61 Philip Sidney, "An Apology for Poetry" in D. J Enright and Ernst de Chickera (eds.), English Critical Texts 16th Century to 20th Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 8. 62 Milton (above, note 27), p. 284. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 63 John Donne, The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 53. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 64 George Gordon, Lord Byron, Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page, rev. John Jump (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 101. 65 Christopher Marlowe, "Hero and Leander" in Reese, M. M. (Ed.), Elizabethan Verse Romances (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 111. 66 George Cleveland, "On the Memory of Mr. Edward King Drown'd in the Irish Seas. [from Poems (1657)]". http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk/searchFulltext.do?id. 67 Thomas Lovell Beddoes, The Complete Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ed. Sir Edmund Gosse, 2 vols. (London: Fanfrolico Press, No Date): 1:80. 68 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Including Poems and Versions of Poems Herein Published for the First Time, Edited with Textual and Bibliographical Notes, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London: Oxford University Press, 1912), p. 297. 69 Helen Gardner, "Introduction," The Metaphysical Poets, ed. Helen Gardner (1957; rev. and rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 19.

428 70

Notes

H. W. Donner, Thomas Lovell Beddoes: The Making of a Poet (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1935), p. 106. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 71 H. W. Donner, Introduction, Plays and Poems of Thomas Lovell Beddoes (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950), p. xix. 72 George Herbert, The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), p. 98. 73 Norman Ault (ed.), Elizabethan Lyrics (1949; rpt. New York: Capricorn, 1960), p. 96. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 74 Ovid, Metamorphoses, tr. Frank Justus Miller, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1916), 1:52-53. 75 Edward Young, The Complaint; or, Night Thoughts (London: F. C. and J. Rivington, etc., 1813), p. 4. 76 Letter LXXVI in H. W. Donner, (ed. and intro.), The Browning Box or The Life and Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes as Reflected in Letters by his Friends and Admirers (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 66. 77 Coleridge (above, note 67), p. 102. 78 Marion M. Scott, Beethoven, rev. Sir Jack Westrup (1934; rev. and rpt. London: J. M. Dent, 1974), p. 36. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 79 Arthur Hedley, Chopin (London: J. M. Dent, 1947), p. 40. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 80 Qtd. in H. W. Donner (above, note 70), pp. xxv-vi. 81 J ohn Keats, Letters of John Keats: A New Selection, ed. Robert Gittings (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 157. 82 H. W. Donner (above, note 75), p. 154. 83 Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longman, 1969), p. 893. 84 Quoted in Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (1986; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 4. 85 Beddoes, ed. Gosse (above, note 67), p. 76. 86 John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Complete Poetical Works With the Explanatory Notes of Shelley's Poems by Mrs. Shelley (New York: Random House, no date), p. 660. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 87 Qtd. in Lee Ann Sonnino, A Handbook of Sixteenth- Century Rhetoric (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 142. 88 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 135. 89 A. C. Spearing, "Introduction," Geoffrey Chaucer, The Franklin's Prologue and Tale from The Canterbury Tales, ed. and intro. A. C. Spearing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 17. 90 Edmund Blunden, "Beddoes and his Contemporaries" in Votive Tablets (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1931), p. 294. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 91 Qtd. in John Haydn Baker, "'Tom's Laocoon': A Newly Discovered Poem by Thomas Lovell Beddoes." Victorian Poetry 40.3 (2002): 263.

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Eleanor Wilner, Gathering the Winds: Visionary Imagination and Radical Transformation of Self and Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), p. 81. 93 John Ebers, qtd. in Ivor Guest, The Romantic Ballet in England: Its Development, Fulfilment and Decline (London: Phoenix House, 1954), p. 34. 94 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. David Daiches (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 367. 95 Beddoes, ed. Gosse (above, note 67), p. 140. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 96 Donner (above, note 70), p. 14. 97 Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, tr. H. T. Lowe-Porter (London: Secker and Warburg, 1948), p. 542. 98 Greg Crossan, "Unnoticed Words in Beddoes for OED," Notes and Queries 50 (2003): 448. 99 Dante, Purgatorio in La commedia divina, 3 vols., tr. John D. Sinclair (1935; rpt. London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 2:106-07. 100 John Dyer, "Grongar Hill" in Poetry of the Landscape and the Night: Two Eighteenth-Century Traditions, ed. Charles Peake (London: Edward Arnold, 1967), p. 91. 101 William Shakespeare, Sonnets,ed. John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), p. 39. 102 Thomas Warton, "The Pleasures of Melancholy," in Robert Dodsley (ed.), A Collection of Poems in Six Volumes by Several Hands, with Notes, 6 vols. (London: John Dodsley, 1782): 4:232. 103 Geoffrey Wagner, "Centennial of a Suicide: Thomas Lovell Beddoes," Horizon 113 (1949): 426. 104 Ault (above, note 73), p. 135. 105 Leigh Hunt, The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt, ed. H. S. Milford (London: Oxford University Press, 1923), p. 22. 106 Ben Jonson, Poems of Ben Jonson, ed. and intro. George Burke Johnston (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954), pp. 115-16. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 107 Spenser, Sonnet LXXXI (above, note 30), p. 576. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 108 Herbert (above, note 72), p. 176. 109 "Sullivan, Arthur" in Harold Rosenthal and John Warrack, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Opera (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 390-91. 110 Keats (above, note 2), p. 42. 111 Herrick (above, note 54), p. 261. 112 George Darley, "The Loveliness of Love" in F. T. Palgrave, (ed.), The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language With Additional Poems (London: Oxford University Press, 1941), p. 74. 113 Gray (above, note 22), p. 200. 114 Haydn, "The Mermaid's Song" in Mezzo-Soprano Songs, 2 vols. (London: Boosey and Hawkes, no date), 1:44.

430 115

Notes

Thomas Malory, The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Eugène Vinaver, rev. P. J. C. Field, 3 vols. (1947; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 1:52. 116 Royall H. Snow, Thomas Lovell Beddoes: Eccentric and Poet (New York: Covici and Friede, 1928), p. 44. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 117 Virgil, Virgil with an English Translation by H. Rushton Fairclough, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1967) 1:224-25. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 118 Homer, The Odyssey, tr. E. V. Rieu (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1946), p. 194. 119 "The Singing Maid" in R. T. Davies (ed. and intro.), Medieval English Lyrics: A Critical Anthology, (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), p. 77. 120 Collins (above, note 22), p. 465. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page number. 121 Pope (above, note 34), p. 131. 122 Northrop Frye, A Study of English Romanticism (1968; rpt. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984), p. 69. 123 James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman and J. D. Fleeman (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1970), p 480. 124 Frye (above, note 122), p. 139. 125 Chr. K. F. Molbech, Elverskud. Libretto for the Marco Polo Recording (1996: 8.224051), pp. 36-37. 126 Hans Christian Andersen, Fairy Tales and Legends (London: Bodley Head, 1942), p. 62. 127 Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Plays: Dido Queen of Carthage, Tamburlaine the Great, Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta, Edward the Second, The Massacre at Paris, ed. J. B. Steane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 283. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 128 Qtd. in I. Bamforth, "Pickled Essence of Englishman: Thomas Lovell Beddoes—Time to Unearth a Neglected Poet? Medical Humanities, 30.1 ( 2004): 36. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 129 Eliot, "Whispers of Immortality" (above, note 58), p. 52. 130 Hiram Kellogg Johnson, "Thomas Lovell Beddoes: A Psychological Study" Psychiatric Quarterly 17 (1963): 453. 131 Shelley (above, note 86), p. 493. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 132 William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 86. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 133 Gray (above, note 22), p. 135 n. 134 Hood (above, note 55), p. 147. 135 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, tr. and intro. Michael Hulse (Harmondworth: Penguin, 1989), p. 134. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 136 Louis Untermeyer (ed.), Collins Albatross Book of Verse: English and American Poetry from the Thirteenth Century to the Present Day (London: Collins, 1933), p. 341.

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W. Peacock (ed.), English Verse Chosen and Edited by W Peacock, 5 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1929) 2:511. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 138 Virgil (above, note 117): 2:100-101. 139 Byron (above, note 64), p. 112. 140 Homer, The Iliad, tr. E. V. Rieu. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950), p. 247. 141 Alexander Pope, The Iliad of Homer, ed. Maynard Mack, 2 vols. (London: Methuen & Co, 1967), 2:136. 142 Percy M. Young, Handel (London: J. M. Dent, 1965), pp. 157-58. 143 Hunt (above, note 105), p. 82. 144 Charles Dickens, The Battle of Life in A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books, intro. G. K. Chesterton (London: J. M. Dent, 1907), p. 251. 145 Milton (above, note 27), p. 401. 146 Young (above, note 75), p. 72. 147 W. H. Auden, Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957. (London: Faber, 1966), p. 107. 148 John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy (1892; rev. and rpt. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1963), p. 322. 149 John Burnet, Greek Philosophy: Thales to Plato (1914; rpt. London: Macmillan, 1960), p. 35. 150 Marvell (above, note 25), p. 52. 151 Plato, The Republic, tr. Desmond Lee (1955; rev. and rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 317. 152 Gray (above, note 22), 136-37. 153 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. A. R. Shilleto, intro. A. H. Bullen, 3 vols. (London: George Bell, 1896): 1:256. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 154 Keats (above, note 2), p. 221. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 155 Warton (above, note 102), 4:252. 156 Pope (above, note 34), p. 252. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 157 George Crabbe, The Poetical Works of George Crabbe,ed. A. J. and R. M. Carlyle (London: Oxford University Press, 1908), p. 198. 158 Mario Bussagli, Bosch: The Life and Work of the Artist Illustrated with 80 Colour Plates (London: Thames and Hudson, 1967), pp. 22-23. 159 Spenser (above, note 30), p. 5. 160 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, Contexts, Nineteenth-Century Responses, Modern Criticism, ed. J. Paul Hunter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), p. 33. 161 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, intro. Max von Boehn (Berlin: Carl Albert Kindle, 1940), p. 17. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 162 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, tr. and intro. Philip Wayne, 2 vols. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959): 1:44. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference.

432 163

Notes

Byron (above, note 64), p. 390. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 164 Sir Walter Scott, The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. Complete in One Volume, intro. and annotated J. G. Lockhart (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1882), p. 103. 165 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Selected Poems, ed. Christopher Middleton, tr. Michael Hamburger, David Luke, Christopher Middleton, John Frederick Nims, Vernon Watkins (Boston: Suhrkamp/Insel Publishers, 1982), pp. 30-33. 166 Horace, The Odes and the Epodes, tr. C. E. Bennett (London: William Heinemann, 1968), pp. 4-5. 167 Thomas Traherne, Centuries, Poems and Thanksgivings,ed. H. M. Margoliouth, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958): 1:15. 168 "The Communion," A Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church Together with the Form and Manner of Making, Ordaining and Consecrating of Bishops, Priests and Deacons Set Forth by Authority for Use in the Church of the Province of South Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 230. 169 Davies (above, note 119), 135. 170 Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, tr. Robert Graves (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), p. 25. 171 Ovid (above, note 74), 2:128-29. 172 Oscar Wilde, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Vyvyan Holland (London: Collins, 1948), p. 844. 173 William H. Marshall, "The Accretive Structure of Byron's 'The Giaour,'" Modern Language Notes 76 (1961): 502. 174 Michael G. Sundall, "The Development of 'The Giaour,'" Studies in English Literature 9 (1969): 587. 175 Tennyson (above, note 83), pp. 246-47. 176 John Agar, "Isbrand and T. L. Beddoes' Aspiring Hero," Studia Neophilologica 45 (1973): 374. 177 Francis Jeffrey, The Edinburgh Review, April, 1895, qtd. in Scott (above, note 164), p. 5n. 178 Strachey (above, note 1), p. 198. 179 Frederick Burwick, "The Anatomy of Revolution: Beddoes and Buchner," Pacific Coast Philology. 6 (1971): 5. 180 Charles Alva Hoyt, "Theme and Imagery in the Poetry of T. L. Beddoes." Studia Neophilologica 35 (1963): 91. 181 Frederick Burwick, "Beddoes and the Schweizerischer Republikaner," Studia Neophilologica 44 (1972): 109. 182 Frederick Burwick, "Beddoes, Bayern und Burschenshaften," Comparative Literature, 21 (1969): 289. 183 Quoted in Ian Beck, "'The Body's Purpose': Browning, and so to Beddoes," Browning Society Notes 14 (1984): 4. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 184 Louis O. Coxe, "Beddoes: The Mask of Parody," The Hudson Review 6 (1953): 253.

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185

Lord Macaulay, "Southey's Colloquies" in Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to the Edinburgh Review, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1890), 1:219. 186 Frederick E. Pierce, "Beddoes and Continental Romanticists," Philological Quarterly 6 (1927): 126.

Chapter Three: "Miscellaneous Poems" 1

H. W. Donner, Thomas Lovell Beddoes: The Making of a Poet (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1935), pp. 61-62. 2 John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Complete Poetical Works With the Explanatory Notes of Shelley's Poems by Mrs. Shelley (New York: Random House, no date), p. 613. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 3 Charles Edmonds (ed.), Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin: Comprising the Celebrated Poetical and Satirical Poems, of the Rt. Hons. G. Canning, John Hookham Frere, W. Pitt, the Marquis Wellesley, G. Ellis, W. Gifford, the Earl of Carlisle and others (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1890), p. 29. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 4 Enid Hamer, The Metres of English Poetry (London: Methuen, 1930), p. 261. 5 Thomas Lovell Beddoes, The Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ed. and intro. H. W. Donner (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 51. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 6 Oscar Wilde, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Vyvyan Holland (London: Collins, 1948), p. 808. 7 Harry Levin, (ed.) The Essential James Joyce (1948; Rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p. 329. 8 Anthony Hartley (ed.), The Penguin Book of French Verse 3: The Nineteenth Century With Plain Prose Translations of Each Poem (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), p. 139. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 9 Iain Bamforth, "Pickled Essence of Englishman: Thomas Lovell Beddoes—Time to Unearth a Neglected Poet?" Journal of the Thomas Lovell Beddoes Society, 12 (2006): 14-19. 10 C. Day Lewis, The Lyric Impulse (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965), pp. 1819. 11 Daniel Karlin, "On Being Second-Rate: The Skeleton Art of Thomas Lovell Beddoes," The Yearbook of English Studies; 36.2 (2006): 39. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 12 Qtd. in Felicitas Tobien, Art Nouveau Paintings, tr. Stephen Gorman (San Diego, CA: Padre Publishers, 1990), p. 27. 13 Qtd. in James McNeill Whistler: An Exhibition of Paintings and Other Works, Organized by the Arts Council of Great Britain and the English-Speaking Union of the United States. Catalogue (London: The Arts Council Gallery, 1960), p. 10. 14 Friedrich Schlegel, Fragmente, selected Carl Enders (Leipzig: Im Insel-Verlag, no date), p. 23. 15 John Keats, Poetical Works,ed. H. W. Garrod (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 219. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference.

434 16

Notes

Greg Crossan, "'That wolf-howled, witch-prayed, owl-sung fool': Beddoes and the Play of Words," Newsletter of the Thomas Lovell Beddoes Society 11 (2005): 28. 17 Thomas Gray, William Collins and Oliver Goldsmith, The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman, 1969), p. 463. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 18 William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 204. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 19 George Herbert, The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), p. 66. 20 Kenneth Clark, Leonardo da Vinci: An Account of his Development as an Artist (1939; rev. and rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959), p. 148. 21 Craig Clunas, Art in China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 151. 22 Peter and Linda Murray, A Dictionary of Art and Artists (1959; rev. and rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 75. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 23 Peter Ackroyd, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (1981; rpt. London: Vintage, 2004), p. 25. 24 Colin Manlove, The Fantasy Literature of England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), p. 116. 25 Gray, Collins and Goldsmith (above, note 16), pp. 162-63. 26 Richard Crashaw, The Complete Poetry of Richard Crashaw, ed. and intro. George Walton Williams (New York: New York University Press, 1972), p. 135. 27 John Donne, The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 46. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 28 Stanley Burnshaw, "The Three Revolutions of Modern Poetry," in The Poem Itself: 150 European Poems Translated and Analysed, ed. Stanley Burnshaw, Dudley Fitts, Henri Peyre and John Frederick Nims (1960; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), p. xxi. 29 Suzanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), p. 125. 30 Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1910), p. 135. 31 Thomas Moore, The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Moore (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1869), p. 199. 32 Anne, Countess of Winchilsea, "A Nocturnal Rêverie," Poetry of the Landscape and Night: Two Eighteenth-Century Traditions, ed. Charles Peake (London: Edward Arnold, 1967), p. 39. 33 Alexander Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text with Selected Annotations, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1963), p. 800. 34 George Herbert, The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), p. 186.

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Ovid, Metamorphoses, tr. Frank Justus Miller, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1916), II: 380-81. 36 Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins, sel. and intro. W. H. Gardner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), p. 55. 37 Quoted in Lee Sonnino, A Handbook of Sixteenth-Century Rhetoric (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 186. 38 Leigh Hunt, The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt (London: Smith, Elder, 1847), p. 348. 39 Thomas Hood, The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hood, ed Walter Jerrold (London: Oxford University Press, 1906), p. 148. 40 George Gordon, Lord Byron, Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page, rev. John Jump (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 251 41 Herbert (above, note 16), p. 166. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 42 Patrick White, Riders in the Chariot (London: Jonathan Cape, 1961), p. 274. 43 Donne (above, note 26), p. 80. 44 Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, 2 vols. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), 1:49. 45 Horace, The Odes and the Epodes, tr. C. E. Bennett (London: William Heinemann, 1968), pp. 68-69. 46 Sir Thomas Wyatt, The Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, ed. and intro Kenneth Muir (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), p. 92. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 47 Contralto Songs 2 vols. (London: Boosey and Hawkes, no date), I:108. 48 Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobrée, intro. Terry Castle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 185. 49 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, ed. Elisabeth Stopp, intro. Peter Hutchinson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), p. 181. 50 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), p. 204. 51 Andrew Marvell, The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, rev. Pierre Legouis and Elsie Duncan-Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 1:12. 52 John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merrit Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957), p.80. 53 Horace, Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, tr. H. R. Fairclough (London: William Heinemann, 1926), pp. 462-63. 54 Shelley (above, note 2), p. 496. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 55 Quoted in Sonnino (above, note 37), p. 15. 56 Michael O'Neill, "'A Storm of Ghosts': Beddoes, Shelley, Death and Reputation," Cambridge Quarterly. 28.2 (1999): 108-09. 57 Donner (above, note 1), p. 75. 58 Quoted in Sonnino (above, note 37), p. 210. 59 Ovid (above, note 35), I:84-85.

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Virgil, Virgil with an English Translation by H. Rushton Fairclough, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1967) 1:46-47. 61 Marvell (above, note 51), 1:18 62 William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well, ed. G. K. Hunter (London: Methuen, 1959), p. 130. 63 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, ed. Elisabeth Stopp, intro. Peter Hutchinson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), p. 59.

Chapter Four: Outidana Part I 1

Thomas Lovell Beddoes, The Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ed. and intro. H. W. Donner (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. xxviii. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 2 H. W. Donner, Thomas Lovell Beddoes: The Making of a Poet (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1935), p. 117. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 3 Percy A. Scholes (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Music, rev. John Owen Ward (1938; rev. and rpt. London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 65. 4 Thomas Lovell Beddoes, The Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ed. and intro. H. W. Donner (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 59. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 5 William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 206. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 6 Christopher Ricks, Tennyson (London: Macmillan, 1972), p. 201. 7 Ovid, Metamorphoses, tr. Frank Justus Miller, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1916), 2:116-17. 8 Horace, The Odes and the Epodes, tr. C. E. Bennett (London: William Heinemann, 1968), pp. 96-97. 9 James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1957), 1:452. 10 Thomas Gray, William Collins and Oliver Goldsmith, The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman, 1969), p. 140. 11 William Shakespeare, The Poems, ed. F. T. Prince (London: Methuen, 1960), p. 3. 12 John Keats, Poetical Works, ed. H. W. Garrod (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 3. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 13 Andrew Marvell, The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, rev. Pierre Legouis and Elsie Duncan-Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 1:18. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 14 John Donne, The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 72. 15 Centenary Prayer Book (London: Faith Press, 1933), p. 94.

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437

"Litaniae Lauretanae Beatae Mariae Virginis," Breviarium Romanum ex Decreto Sacrosancti Concilii Tridentini Restitutum S. Pii V Pontificis Maximi Jussu Editum Aliorumque Pontificum Cura Recognitum Pii Papae X Auctoritate Reformatum cum Nova Psalterii Translatione Pii Papae XII Jussu Edita, 4 vols. (Turin: Sumptibus et Typis Mame, 1949), 4:292. 18 William Shakespeare, Sonnets, ed. John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), p. 17. 19 "The Singing Maid" in R. T. Davies (ed. and intro.), Medieval English Lyrics: A Critical Anthology, (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), p. 77. 20 William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1930; rev. and rpt. 1950), p. 281. 21 W. Peacock (ed.), English Verse Chosen and Edited by W Peacock, 5 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1929), 3:524. 22 John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Complete Poetical Works With the Explanatory Notes of Shelley's Poems by Mrs. Shelley (New York: Random House, no date), p. 616. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 23 William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream,ed. Harold F. Brooks (London: Methuen, 1979), p. 71 n. 24 Michael Ferber, A Dictionary of Literary Symbols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 223. 25 Victor Lasareff, Russian Icons From the 12th to the 15th Century (London: Collins Unesco, 1962), p. 20. 26 Peacock (above, note 21), 2:434 27 Meric Casaubon, A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years between Dr. John Dee . . . and Some Spirits (London: D. Maxwell for T. Garthwait, 1659), p. 219. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 28 Ibid., no page reference. 29 Pliny, Natural History with a Translation, tr. D. E. Eichholz. 10 vols.(London: William Heinemann, 1962), 10:88-89. 30 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Poems and Translations 1850-1870 Together with the Prose Story 'HAND AND SOUL.' (London: Oxford University Press, 1913), p. 1. 31 John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merrit Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957), p. 283. 32 Keats (above, note 12), p. 5. Hereafter cited parenthetically within the text by page reference. 33 Gray (above, note 10), p. 136. 34 Richard D. Altick, The Art of Literary Research (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), p. 50. 35 Qtd. Donner (above, note 2), p. 242. 36 Algernon Charles Swinburne, Swinburne’s Poems, 6 vols. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1911), 3:84. 37 Gertrude Grace Sill, A Handbook of Symbols in Christian Art (New York: Macmillan, 1975), p. 48. 38 Philip Sidney, The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler, Jr. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 167.

438 39

Notes

Cassius Dio Cocceianus. Dio’s Roman History With an English Translation by Earnest Cary, PhD., on the Basis of the Version of Herbert Baldwin Foster, PhD. 9 vols. London: William Heinemann, 1914. 3:447. 40 George Herbert, The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), p. 98. 41 Richard Wilbur, New and Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1989), p. 233. 42 Collins (above, note 10), p. 365. 43 Euripides, Three Plays: Hippolytus, Iphigenia in Tauris, Alcestis, tr. Philip Vellacott (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), p. 130. 44 Ovid, Metamorphoses, tr. Frank Justus Miller, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1916), 1:152-53. 45 Alexander Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text with Selected Annotations, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1963), p. 262. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 46 Shelley (above, note 22), p. 589. 47 Giacomo Meyerbeer and Eugène Scribe. L'Africaine. Myto Records 3 MCD 011.235 (2001), no page reference. 48 Sir W. S. Gilbert, The Savoy Operas Being the Complete Text of the Gilbert and Sullivan Operas as Originally Produced in the Years 1875-1896 (London: Macmillan, 1962), p. 526. 49 Gray (above, note 10), pp. 191-92. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 50 Shelley (above, note 22), p.485. 51 Milton (above, note 31), p. 124. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 52 W. H. Auden, Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957. (London: Faber, 1966), p. 107. 53 Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longman, 1969), p. 602. 54 Donne (above, note 14), p. 72. 55 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 137. 56 Wordsworth (above, note 2), p. 149. 57 Thomas Hood, The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hood, ed Walter Jerrold (London: Oxford University Press, 1906), p. 148. 58 George Cleveland, "On the Memory of Mr. Edward King Drown'd in the Irish Seas. [from Poems (1657)]". http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk/searchFulltext.do?id. 59 Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, 2 vols. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), 1:49. 60 Thomas Gray, William Collins and Oliver Goldsmith, The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman, 1969), p. 437. 61 Virgil, Virgil with an English Translation by H. Rushton Fairclough, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1967), pp. 406-07. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 62 Monk John, Canon for Paschahttp://www.anastasis.org.uk/PaschaCan.htm.

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63

Hymns Ancient & Modern Revised (London: William Clowes, no date), p. 336. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Don Giovanni Dramma Giocoso in Zwei Aufzügen Text von Lorenzo da Ponte Deutsch von Franz Grandaur KV 527 Nach dem Autograph Revidiert und mit Einführung Versehen von Alfred Einstein (Leipzig: Edition Peters, no date), p. 506. 65 Shelley (above, note 22), p. 589. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 64

Chapter Five: Outidana Part 2 1

Kenneth Clark, The Nude. A Study of Ideal Art (1956; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), p. 219. 2 David Brown, Tchaikovsky: A Biographical and Critical Study, 4 vols. (London: Victor Gollancz, 1978-91), 1:279-80. 3 Ezra Pound, Selected Poems, intro. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1948), p. 113. 4 Thomas Lovell Beddoes, The Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ed. and intro. H. W. Donner (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 67. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 5 H. D., "Sea Rose," in Michael Roberts and Donald Hall (eds.), The Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936; rev. and rpt London: Faber, 1965. 6 George Herbert, The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), p. 59. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 7 John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Complete Poetical Works With the Explanatory Notes of Shelley's Poems by Mrs. Shelley (New York: Random House, no date), p. 285. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 8 Lucius Apuleius, The Transformations of Lucius Otherwise Known As The Golden Ass, tr. Robert Graves (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950), p. 121. 9 John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merrit Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957), p. 213. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 10 Horace, The Odes and the Epodes, tr. C. E. Bennett (London: William Heinemann, 1968), pp. 278-79. 11 William Shakespeare, Sonnets, ed. John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), p. 35. 12 Edmund Spenser, “Prefatory Letter to Sir Walter Raleigh On The Faerie Queene.”http://www.bartleby.com/39/14.html. 13 Virgil, Virgil with an English Translation by H. Rushton Fairclough, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1967), pp. 126-27. 14 Victor Hugo, Lucrèce Borgia, Drame (Paris: Eugène Renduel, Libraire, 1833), p. 159. 15 Anthony Blunt, Poussin (London: Purnell, 1966) p. 8. 16 John Keats, Poetical Works, ed. H. W. Garrod (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 219. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 17 T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1969), p. 37. An upper-case has replaced the lower-case J in this edition.

440 18

Notes

W. Peacock (ed.), English Verse Chosen and Edited by W Peacock, 5 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1929) 2:434. 19 Beddoes (above, note 5), p. xxvii. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 20 Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance. (958; rev. and rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 89. 21 John Hadfield (ed.), A Book of Delights: An Anthology of Words and Pictures Compiled by John Hadfield (London: Hulton Press, 1956), p. 136. 22 George Gordon, Lord Byron, Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page, rev. John Jump (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 77. 23 Horace, Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica,tr. H. R. Fairclough (London: William Heinemann, 1926), pp. 450-51. 24 Catullus, Tibullus and Pervigilium Veneris, tr. F. W. Cornish, J. P. Postgate and J. W. Mackail (London: William Heinemann, 1968), pp. 4-5. 25 Thomas Gray, William Collins and Oliver Goldsmith, The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman, 1969), p. 51. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 26 John Donne, The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 47. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 27 Peacock (above, note 18), 2:125. 28 Mary, Chamot, Mary, Olive Cook, W. C. H. King, Malcolm Osborne, Charles Reilly, R. R. Tomlinson and Charles Wheeler, The Arts: Painting, The Graphic Arts, Sculpture and Architecture, intro. Thomas Bodkin (London: Odhams, no date), p. 79. 29 Edmund Spenser, Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt, intro. E. de Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 102. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 30 T. D. Barlow, Woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1948), p. 11. 31 Collins (above, note 25), p. 437. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 32 Oliver Goldsmith The Vicar of Wakefield (London: Oxford University Press, 1901), p. 150. 33 "The Singing Maid" in R. T. Davies (ed. and intro.), Medieval English Lyrics: A Critical Anthology, (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), p. 77. 34 Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Mazeppa, Libretto for the DG Recording 439 906-2, Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra/Neeme Järvi (1994), p. 170. 35 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Including Poems and Versions of Poems Herein Published for the First Time, Edited with Textual and Bibliographical Notes, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London: Oxford University Press, 1912), p. 202. 36 Johan Sebastian Bach, The Passion of Our Lord According to S. Matthew, ed. Edward Elgar and Ivor Atkins (London: Novello, no date), p. 5. 37 Richard Crashaw, The Complete Poetry of Richard Crashaw, ed. and intro. George Walton Williams (New York: New York University Press, 1972), p. 133.

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Benjamin West, Agrippina landing at Brundisium with the ashes of Germanicus, (1768, oil on canvas). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Benjamin_West_001.jpg 39 Qtd. in Anita Brookner, Jacques-Louis David (London: Chatto and Windus, 1980), p. 72. 40 Charlotte Brontë, Shirley: A Tale, intro. Phyllis Bentley (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1953), p. 53. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 41 Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives with an English Translation by Bernadotte Perrin, 10 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1914): 1:263. 42 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, The Requiem Mass in Vocal Score Composed by W. A. Mozart, ed. and arranged W. T. Best (London: Novello, no date), pp. 20-21. 43 H. W. Donner, Thomas Lovell Beddoes: The Making of a Poet (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1935), p. 137. 44 Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger’s Child (London: Picador, 2011), p. 161. 45 Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longman, 1969), p. 563. 46 Andrew Marvell, The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, rev. Pierre Legouis and Elsie Duncan-Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 1:28. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 47 R. H. Barrow, The Romans (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949), p. 158. 48 William Blake, Blake: The Complete Poems: Second Edition, ed. W. H. Stevenson (1971; rpt. and rev. London: Longman, 1989), p. 144. 49 F. T. Palgrave, (ed.), The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language With Additional Poems (London: Oxford University Press, 1941), p. 336. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 50 Shelley (above, note 7), p. 616. 51 W. H. Auden, Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957. (London: Faber, 1966), p. 92. 52 Donne (above, note 26), p. 72. 53 Milton (above, note 9), p. 124. 54 William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 149. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 55 Shakespeare (above, note 11), p. 39. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 56 Timaeus, Plato with an English Translation, tr. R. G. Bury (London: William Heinemann, 1929), 7:91. 57 Goethe, Selected Poetry, tr. and intro. David Luke (London: Libris, 1999), pp. 60-61. 58 T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1969), p. 52. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 59 Nikolaus Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1943), p. 228. 60 Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, intro. Lionel Trilling (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 433.

442 61

Notes

Anne, Countess of Winchilsea, "A Nocturnal Rêverie" in Poetry of the Landscape and the Night: Two Eighteenth-Century Traditions, ed. Charles Peake (London: Edward Arnold, 1967), p. 40. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 62 Thomas Parnell, "A Night-Piece on Death," ibid., p. 83. 63 Robert Blair, "The Grave," ibid., p. 119. 64 E. E. Cummings, 100 Selected Poems (New York: Grove Press, no date), p. 73. 65 Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (London: Macmillan, 1957), p. 187. 66 Coleridge, (above, note 35), p. 194. 67 Andrew Marvell,"A Dialogue between the Soul and Body," The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, rev. Pierre Legouis and Elsie Duncan-Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 1:21. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 68 Ivor Guest, The Romantic Ballet in Paris (1966; rev. and rpt. London: Dance Books, 1980), p. 212. 69 Franz Molnar, Liliom: A Legend in Seven Scenes and a Prologue, tr. and intro. Benjamin F. Glazer (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921), p. 180. 70 Contralto Songs 2 vols. (London: Boosey and Hawkes, no date), I:52-53. 71 Milton, (above, note 9), p. 124. 72 Herbert, (above, note 6), p. 142. 73 Qtd. in Jeremy Siepmann, Chopin: Reluctant Romantic (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995), p. 153. 74 Donne, (above, note 26), p. 77. 75 Robert Browning, "The Patriot: An Odd Story" in Browning: A Selection, ed. W. E. Williams (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954), p. 65. 76 William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, ed. J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik (London: Methuen, 1975), pp. 42-43 n. 77 Oscar Wilde, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Vyvyan Holland (London: Collins, 1948), p. 790. 78 Gray (above, note 25), pp. 162-63. 79 John Keats, (above, note 16), p. 209. 80 Mary Howitt, "The Spider and the Fly" http://www.poetry-online.org/ howitt_the_spider_and_the_fly_funny.htm. 81 Collins (above, note 25), p. 465. 82 Alexander Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text with Selected Annotations, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1963), p. 218. 83 Franz Schubert, Sixty Songs by Schubert With German and English Words. The Latter by Maria X. Hayes, ed. J. A. Kappey (London: Boosey and Co., no date), p. 45. 84 Tennyson, (above, note 45), p. 787. 85 Wordsworth, (above, note 54), p. 149. 86 Thomas Moore, Lallah Rooke http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/lallarookh/part_04.html.

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87

Dante, Paradiso in La commedia divina, 3 vols., tr. John D. Sinclair (1935; rpt. London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 3:52. 88 Dante, The Comedy of Dante Alighieri the Florentine, tr. Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds, 3 vols. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949-62), 3:75. 89 Donne (above, note 26), p. 47. 90 William Cowper, Poetical Works, ed. H. S. Milford, rev. Norma Russell (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 352. 91 Jubilate Agno, Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, Jon Stallworthy (eds.), The Norton Anthology of Poetry (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), p. 625. 92 Auden (above, note 51), p. 160. 93 William Shakespeare, Sonnets, ed. John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), p. 39. 94 "The Waste Land" in T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1969), p. 75. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 95 D. H. Lawrence, The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts, 2 vols. (1964; rpt and rev. London: Heinemann, 1972), 1:524. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 96 Christopher Ricks, "Thomas Lovell Beddoes," Grand Street 1 (1982):48.

Chapter Six: Outidana Part 3 1 Thomas Lovell Beddoes, The Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ed. and intro. H. W. Donner (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. xxviii. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 2 Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, 2 vols. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), 1:211. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 3 Apollodorus, The Library with an English Translation by Sir James George Frazer, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1921), 2:85. 4 Arnobius of Sicca, The Case Against the Pagans, tr. and annotated George E. McCracken, 2 vols. (Westminster, Maryland: The Newman Press, 1949), 2:475. 5 Ovid, Metamorphoses, tr. Frank Justus Miller, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1916), 2:80. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 6 "Pygmalion, Scène lyrique," Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, 5 vols. (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1964), II:1224. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 7 H. W. Donner, Thomas Lovell Beddoes: The Making of a Poet (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1935), p. 174. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 8 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, ed. Elisabeth Stopp, intro. Peter Hutchinson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), p. 143-44. 9 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 17. 10 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Including Poems and Versions of Poems Herein Published for the First Time, Edited with

444

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Textual and Bibliographical Notes, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London: Oxford University Press, 1912), p. 297. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 11 Horace, The Odes and the Epodes, tr. C. E. Bennett (London: William Heinemann, 1968), pp. 168-69. 12 Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longman, 1969), p. 189. 13 John Keats, Poetical Works, ed. H. W. Garrod (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 196. 14 Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, intro. Lionel Trilling (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 34. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 15 Thomas Gray, William Collins and Oliver Goldsmith, The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman, 1969), p. 136. 16 Pliny, Natural History With an English Translation, tr. H. Rackham, 10 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1933-63), 9:308-09. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 17 Kenneth Clark, Leonardo da Vinci: An Account of his Development as an Artist (1939; rev. and rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959), p. 140. 18 David Bindman, European Sculpture: Bernini to Rodin (London: Studio Vista, 1970), p. 64. 19 John Dryden, "A Song for St Cecilia's Day," The Poems and Fables of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 423. 20 Sweeney Agonistes, in T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1969), p. 122. 21 Horace, Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, tr. H. R. Fairclough (London: William Heinemann, 1926), pp. 426-27. 22 Virgil, Virgil with an English Translation by H. Rushton Fairclough, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1967), 1:396-97. 23 Lucretius, De Rerum Natura With An English Translation, tr. W. H. D. Rouse, rev. Martin Ferguson Smith (London: William Heinemann, 1975), pp. 148-49. 24 H. D. F. Kitto, The Greeks (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951), p. 219. 25 M. I. Finley, The Ancient Greeks (1963; Rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 146. 26 John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Complete Poetical Works With the Explanatory Notes of Shelley's Poems by Mrs. Shelley (New York: Random House, no date), p. 198. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 27 Anthony Hartley (ed.), The Penguin Book of French Verse 3: The Nineteenth Century With Plain Prose Translations of Each Poem. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), p. 60. 28 Porphyry: On the Life of Plotinus and the Arrangement of his Work. http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/plotenn/enn001.htm. 29 William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 164. 30 R. F. Treharne and Harold Fuller, Muir's Historical Atlas Ancient and Classical (London: George Philip and Son, 1938), p. 6.

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William Cowper, Poetical Works, ed. H. S. Milford, rev. Norma Russell (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 166. 32 Wallace Stevens, Selected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), p. 36. 33 George Herbert, The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), p. 153. 34 Horace (above, note 52), pp. 302-03. 35 "All Things Bright and Beautiful," http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/a/l/allthing.htm. 36 Shelley, Percy Bysshe. A Defence of Poetry. http://www.bartleby.com/27/23.html. 37 A Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church Together with the Form and Manner of Making, Ordaining and Consecrating of Bishops, Priests and Deacons Set Forth by Authority for Use in the Church of the Province of South Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 230. 38 Gabriel Fauré, Requiem, Messe basse, Cantique de Jean Racine, Libretto Booklet for the Naxos CD Recording, 8.550765, p. 10. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 39 Goethe, "Der Zauberlehrling" in H. G. Fiedler, H. G. (ed.), A Book of German Verse from Luther to Liliencron, Edited, with Introduction, Outlines of German Versification and Notes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916), p. 90. 40 Christopher Ricks, "Pilgrim Misery: Thomas Lovell Beddoes," Grand Street 3 (1982): 98. 41 Mary-Jane Opie, Sculpture (London: Dorling-Kindersley, 1994), p. 38. 42 Oscar Wilde, (above, note 15), p. 293. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 43 Lucretius (above, note 54), pp. 20-21. 44 "Western Wind" in R. T. Davies (ed. and intro.), Medieval English Lyrics: A Critical Anthology, (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), p. 291. 45 Eric Newton, European Painting and Sculpture (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1941), p. 15. 46 Bindman, (above, note 18), p. 39. 47 Robert Wallace and the Editors of Time-Life Books, The World of Bernini: 1598-1680 (Amsterdam: Time-Life Books, 1970), p. 28. 48 Ben Jonson, Poems of Ben Jonson, ed. and intro. George Burke Johnston (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954), p. 115. 49 Chris and Helen Pellant, 1000 Things You Should Know about Rocks & Minerals (Great Barfield: Miles-Kelly Publishing, 2006), p. 34. 50 Henry Hart Milman, "Rome, Palaces and Villas of The Belvedere Apollo" http://www.bartleby.com/270/5/311.html. 51 John Donne, The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 72. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 52 John Donne, The Sermons of John Donne, ed. and intro. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1953-62) 5:347-48.

446

Notes

53

Gioacchino Rossini, Record sleeve of the Stabat Mater, The State Armenian Orchestra/Oganes Tschekidshjan (Eurodisc: no date). 54 Horace, Ars Poetica (above, note 52), pp. 474-75. 55 Thomas Aquinas, "O Salutaris Hostia." http://www.preces-latinae.org/thesaurus/Euch/OSalutaris.html. 56 Peter Shaffer, Amadeus: A Play, intro. Sir Peter Hall (1981; rpt. London: Perennial, 2001), p. 57. 57 Kirsten Bradbury, Michelangelo, intro. Lucinda Hawksley (Bath: Parragon, 2002), p. 146. 58 Graves (above, note 33), 1:318. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 59 Donner (above, note 38), p. 134. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 60 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), p. 149. 61 Qtd. in Clark (above, note 48), p. 83. 62 W. A. Mozart [and Lorenzo da Ponte], Così fan tutte: Komische Oper in Zwei Akten, Dramma giocoso in due atti, Deutsche Bearbeitung nach der Überlieferung und dem Urtext von Georg Schünemann: Partitur, ed. Georg Schünemann and Kurt Soldan (Leipzig: Edition Peters, 1972), p. 134. 63 Pellant (above, note 51), p. 6. 64 Chaucer (above, note 9), p. 137. 65 Doctor Faustus in Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Plays of Christopher Marlowe: Dido, Queen of Carthage, Tamburlaine the Great, Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta, Edward the Second, The Massacre at Paris, ed. and intro J. B. Steane (Harmondsworth; Penguin, 1969), pp. 336-37. 66 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, intro. Max von Boehn (Berlin: Carl Albert Kindle, 1940), p. 449. 67 Virgil (above, note 22), 1:534-35. 68 E. T. A. Hoffmann, "The Sandman," in Eight Tales of Hoffmann, tr. and intro. J. M. Cohen) (London: Pan Books, 1952), p. 45. 69 Victor Hugo, The Toilers of the Sea, tr. Joseph Blamire, 2 vols. (London: George Routledge, 1887), 2:254. 70 Alexander Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text with Selected Annotations, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1963), p. 233.

Chapter Seven: Letters in Verse 1

No. 618, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele and Others, The Spectator, 4 vols. (London: J. M. Dent, no date), 4:208. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 2 F. W. Bateson, "Introduction" to Alexander Pope, Epistles to Several Persons (Moral Essays), ed. F. W. Bateson (London: Methuen, 1951), p. xv.

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Thomas Lovell Beddoes, The Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ed. and intro. H. W. Donner (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 67. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 4 Catullus, Tibullus and Pervigilium Veneris, tr. F. W. Cornish, J. P. Postgate and J. W. Mackail (London: William Heinemann, 1968), pp. 18-19. 5 Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longman, 1969), p. 1023. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page number. 6 H. W. Donner, Thomas Lovell Beddoes: The Making of a Poet (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1935), p. 193. 7 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Outre-mer: A Pilgrimage Beyond the Sea (New York: Harper, 1856), p. 202. 8 Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, intro. Lionel Trilling (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 28. 9 John Keats, Poetical Works, ed. H. W. Garrod (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 207. 10 William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 377. 11 Alexander Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text with Selected Annotations, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1963), p. 243. 12 John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merrit Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957), p. 254. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 13 W. Peacock (ed.), English Verse Chosen and Edited by W Peacock, 5 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1929), 2:183. 14 Ibid., 4:218. 15 Keats, above (note 9) p. 220. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 16 William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 156. 17 Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Defence of Poetry" in D. J Enright and Ernst de Chickera (eds.) English Critical Texts 16th Century to 20th Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. xx. 18 Timaeus, Plato with an English Translation, tr. R. G. Bury (London: William Heinemann, 1929), 7:91. 19 Lucretius, De Rerum Natura,tr. W. H. D. Rouse (London: William Heinemann, 1924), pp. 172-73. 20 Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, 2 vols. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), 1:76. 21 Norman Ault (ed.), Elizabethan Lyrics (1949; rpt. New York: Capricorn, 1960), p. 149. 22 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 483. 23 Ovid, Ovid with An English Translation: Heroides and Amores, tr. Grant Showerman (London: William Heinemann, 1925), pp. 370-71.

448 24

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Andrew Marvell, The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, rev. Pierre Legouis and Elsie Duncan-Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 1:28. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 25 John Donne, The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 45. 26 Rudyard Kipling, "Mandalay." http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Mandalay. 27 Thomas Gray, William Collins and Oliver Goldsmith, The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman, 1969), pp. 48-49. 28 Leigh Hunt, The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt, ed. H. S. Milford (London: Oxford University Press, 1923), p. 22. 29 Ian Cameron and Elizabeth Kingsley-Rowe (eds.), Collins Encylopaedia of Antiques, intro. Sir John Pope-Hennessy (London and Glasgow: William Collins Sons, 1973), p. 361. 30 Abraham Cowley, The Works of Mr. Abraham Cowley in Two Volumes. Consisting of Those which Were Formerly Printed; and Those which He Design'd for the Press, Publish'd out of the Author's Original Copies with the Cutter of Coleman-Street, 2 vols. (London: Jacob Tonson, 1707), 1:303 (ll.385-86). 31 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Selected Poems, ed. Christopher Middleton, tr. Michael Hamburger, David Luke, Christopher Middleton, John Frederick Nims, Vernon Watkins (Boston: Suhrkamp/Insel Publishers, 1982), pp. 32-33. 32 Rodney Stenning Edgecombe,"Two Dickensian Features of Style" Style 44.4 (2010): 593. 33 Sir W. S. Gilbert, The Savoy Operas Being the Complete Text of the Gilbert and Sullivan Operas as Originally Produced in the Years 1875-1896 (London: Macmillan, 1962), p. 561. 34 http://www.corbisimages.com/stock-photo/rights-managed/42-32352019/18thcentury-engraving-of-raphaels-school-of-athens. 35 Thomas Gray, William Collins and Oliver Goldsmith, The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman, 1969), p. 63. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 36 This text has been posted on the Thomas Lovell Beddoes website. http://www.phantomwooer.org/another_letter_to_the_same_b_w_procter_from_go ttingen_march_1826.html. 37 Edmund Spenser, Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt, intro. E. de Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 114. 38 Anthony Hartley (ed.), The Penguin Book of French Verse 3: The Nineteenth Century With Plain Prose Translations of Each Poem (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), p. 76. 39 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 135. 40 A. C. Spearing, Introduction, The Franklin's Prolgoue and Tale from The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. and intro. A. C. Spearing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 17.

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John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Complete Poetical Works With the Explanatory Notes of Shelley's Poems by Mrs. Shelley (New York: Random House, no date), p. 618. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 42 Keats (above, note 9), p. 208. 43 Wordsworth (above, note 10), p. 206. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 44 Homer, The Odyssey, tr. E. V. Rieu (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1946), pp. 16162. 45 William Cowper, Poetical Works, ed. H. S. Milford, rev. Norma Russell (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 183. 46 Percy A. Scholes (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Music, rev. John Owen Ward (1938; rev. and rpt. London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 417. 47 S. J. Freedberg, Painting in Italy 1500 to 1600 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 89. 48 "East Coker" in T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1969), p. 180. 49 H. V. Usill, The Story of the British People in Pictures (London: Odhams, 1949), p. 132. 50 Pope, (above, note 11), p. 146. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 51 Horace, Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica,tr. H. R. Fairclough (London: William Heinemann, 1926), pp. 452-53. 52 Charles Perrault, The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, tr. and intro. Geoffery Brereton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), p. 100. 53 Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, 2 vols. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), 1:282-83. 54 Horace, The Odes and the Epodes, tr. C. E. Bennett (London: William Heinemann, 1968), pp. 168-69. 55 Pliny, Natural History with a Translation, tr. D. E. Eichholz. 10 vols.(London: William Heinemann, 1962), 3:32-33. 56 Norman Ault (ed.), Elizabethan Lyrics (1949; rpt. New York: Capricorn, 1960), p. 146. 57 John Donne, The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 313. 58 Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, tr. Robert Graves (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), p. 286. 59 John Burnet, Greek Philosophy: Thales to Plato (1914; rpt. London: Macmillan, 1960), p. 192. 60 Minor Latin Poets, with Introductions and English Translations, tr. J. Wight Duff and Arnold M. Duff (London: Heinemann, 1954), p. 444–45. 61 Christopher Hollis, Sir Thomas More (London: Sheed and Ward, 1937), pp. 29697. 62 Donner (above, note 6), pp. 193-94. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 63 Ivor H. Evans (ed.), Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1870; rev. and rpt. London: Cassell, 1981), p. 748.

450

Notes

64

Paul Keegan (ed.), The New Penguin Book of English Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), p. 429. 65 Studentenlieder: Verband der Vereine Deutscher Studenten http://www.vvdst.org/studentenlieder/259-wein-weib-gesang.html 66 Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, intro. Marcus Stone (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 129. 67 John Dryden, "To the MEMORY of Mr. OLDHAM," The Poems and Fables of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 324. 68 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins. (London: Methuen, 1982), pp. 442-43. 69 Donner (above, note 6), p. 179.

Chapter Eight: Poems Chiefly from Death’s Jest-Book (Composed 1825-1829) Part 1 1

Thomas Lovell Beddoes, The Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ed. and intro. H. W. Donner (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. xxxi. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 2 John Burnet, Greek Philosophy: Thales to Plato (1914; rpt. London: Macmillan, 1960), p. 43. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 3 "A Description of the Morning" in Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, Jon Stallworthy (eds.), The Norton Anthology of Poetry (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), p. 526. 4 Dorothy Parker, "Résumé," ibid., p. 1280. 5 R. T. Davies (ed. and intro.), Medieval English Lyrics: A Critical Anthology, (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), p. 52. 6 Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (New York, Grosset and Dunlap, 1946), p. 15. 7 William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair, intro. Whitelaw Reid (London: J. M. Dent, 1941), p. 29. 8 Horace, Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, tr. H. R. Fairclough (London: William Heinemann, 1926), pp. 450-51. 9 Kenneth Clark, The Nude. A Study of Ideal Art (1956; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), p. 10. 10 Herodotus, Herodotus with an English Translation, tr. A. D. Godley, 4 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1921), 1:155. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 11 John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merrit Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957), p. 283. 12 W. Peacock (ed.), English Verse Chosen and Edited by W. Peacock, 5 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1929) 2:435. 13 Seneca with an English Translation, tr. Frank Justus Miller, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1917), I:172-73. 14 Elizabeth Pilliod, Pontormo Bronzino Allori: A Genealogy of Florentine Art (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 39.

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Robert Burns, "Tam O' Shanter" in W. MacNeile Dixon and H. J. C. Grierson (eds.) The English Parnassus: An Anthology Chiefly of Longer Poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), p. 258. 16 Illustrated in the article entitled "Danse Macabre." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danse_Macabre. 17 Quoted in the article entitled "Henri Cazalis." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Cazalis. 18 Sir W. S. Gilbert, The Savoy Operas Being the Complete Text of the Gilbert and Sullivan Operas as Originally Produced in the Years 1875-1896 (London: Macmillan, 1962), p. 525. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 19 "East Coker," "Four Quartets" in T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1969), p. 178. 20 Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, Jon Stallworthy (eds.), The Norton Anthology of Poetry (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), p. 347. 21 George Herbert, The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), p. 60. 22 Dante, The Comedy of Dante Alighieri the Florentine, tr. Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds, 3 vols. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949-62), 1:157. 23 Milton (above, note 11), p. 401. 24 Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim. A Tale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), p. 163. 25 Virgil, Virgil with an English Translation by H. Rushton Fairclough, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1967) 1: 546-47. 26 Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (London: Caxton Publishing Company, no date), p. 70. 27 Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Werke, 4 vols. (Munich: Artemis & Winkler, 1992), 1:238. 28 Heinrich Heine, The Complete Poems of Heinrich Heine: A Modern English Version by Hal Draper (Boston: Suhrkamp/Insel, 1982), p. 364. 29 Claudius, "Der Tod und das Mädchen" in Franz Schubert, Schubert-Album. Sammlung der Lieder für eine Singstimme mit Pianofortebegleitung, ed. Max Friedlaender, 6 vols. (Leipzig: C. F. Peters, no date), 1:221. 30 Julian Budden, The Operas of Verdi, 3 vols. (London: Cassell, 1973-81), 1:321. 31 Howard Nemerov, The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), p. 81. 32 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Der Erlkönig," in H. G. Fiedler, H. G. (ed.), A Book of German Verse from Luther to Liliencron, Edited, with Introduction, Outlines of German Versification and Notes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916), p. 77. 33 Alexander Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text with Selected Annotations, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1963), p. 800. 34 Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, intro. Lionel Trilling (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 433. 35 Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, George Gordon, Lord Byron, Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page, rev. John Jump (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 248.

452 36

Notes

William Blake, Blake: The Complete Poems: Second Edition, ed. W. H. Stevenson (1971; rpt. and rev. London: Longman, 1989), p. 155. 37 John Donne, The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 82. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 38 Robert Frost, Poems, selected by Robert Frost, intro. C. Day Lewis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), p. 159. 39 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Including Poems and Versions of Poems Herein Published for the First Time, Edited with Textual and Bibliographical Notes, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London: Oxford University Press, 1912), p. 364. 40 John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Complete Poetical Works With the Explanatory Notes of Shelley's Poems by Mrs. Shelley (New York: Random House, no date), p. 617. 41 Sacheverell Sitwell, The Romantic Ballet from Contemporary Prints (London: B. T. Batsford, 1948), p. 11. 42 John Keats, Poetical Works, ed. H. W. Garrod (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 469n. 43 Walter Clauss, Deutsche Literatur: Eine Geschichtliche Darstellung ihrer Hauptgestalten (Zurich: Schulthess & Co, 1960), p. 51. 44 Thomas Lovell Beddoes, The Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ed. and intro. H. W. Donner (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 699. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 45 Robert Herrick, The Poems of Robert Herrick, ed. L. C. Martin (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 69. 46 Clark (above, note 9), p. 73. 47 C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), p. 8. 48 Ludwig van Beethoven Fidelio, Libretto Booklet for the Decca LP Recording: SET 272-3, p. 5. 49 Thomas Gray, William Collins and Oliver Goldsmith, The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman, 1969), pp. 224-25. 50 Virgil (above, note 25), pp. 2-3. 51 The epigraph to Gray's "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College" (above, note 49), p. 56. 52 Oliver Goldsmith The Vicar of Wakefield (London: Oxford University Press, 1901), p. 150. 53 Andrew Marvell, The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, rev. Pierre Legouis and Elsie Duncan-Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 1:27. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 54 Plato, The Republic, tr. Desmond Lee (1955; rev. and rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 317. 55 Milton, (above, note 11), p. 70. 56 Shelley (above, note 40), p. 493. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference.

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57

William Shakespeare, Sonnets, ed. John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), p. 17. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 58 Biblia Sacra Vulgatae Editionis Sixti V Pointificis Maximi Jussu Recognita et Clementis VIII Auctoriate Edita. Nova Editio Accuratissime Emendata A. DD. Archiepsicopo Parisiensi Approbata (Paris: Garnier, no date), p. 775. 59 Charles Dickens, Hard Times, intro. Dingle Foot (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 216. 60 Schubert (above, note 29), p. 184. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 61 "The Hollow Men," Eliot (above, note 19), p. 85. 62 William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 461. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 63 Seneca (above, note 13), 1:172-73. 64 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, intro. Max von Boehn (Berlin: Carl Albert Kindle, 1940), p. 449.

Chapter Nine: "Poems from the Later Versions of Death’s Jest-Book and Other Poems, 1829-44" Part 2 1 Thomas Lovell Beddoes, The Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ed. and intro. H. W. Donner (London: Oxford University Press, 1935). Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 2 Matthew Craske, Art in Europe 1700-1830. A History of the Visual Arts in an Era of Unprecedented Urban Economic Growth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 125. 3 Winifred Gérin, Charlotte Brontë. The Evolution of Genius (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 43. 4 Thomas Gray, "The Progress of Poesy. A Pindaric Ode,", Thomas Gray, William Collins and Oliver Goldsmith, The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman, 1969), p. 174. 5 Luigi Cherubini, Requiem Mass in C Minor for Four-Part Chorus of Mixed Voices with Piano Accompaniment (New York: Edwin F. Kalmus, no date), pp. 1718. 6 John Keble, The Christian Year. Thoughts in Verse for the Sundays and Holydays Throughout the Year (London: Oxford University Press, no date), p. 126. 7 Thomas Gray (above, note 4), p. 120. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 8 Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, Jon Stallworthy (eds.), The Norton Anthology of Poetry (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), p. 1051. 9 Ludwig van Beethoven Fidelio, Libretto Booklet for the Decca LP Recording: SET 272-3, p. 7.

454 10

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William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1930; rev. and rpt. 1950), p. 211. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 11 Breviarium Romanum ex Decreto Sacrosancti Concilii Tridentini Restitutum S. Pii V Pontificis Maximi Jussu Editum Aliorumque Pontificum Cura Recognitum Pii Papae X Auctoritate Reformatum cum Nova Psalterii Translatione Pii Papae XII Jussu Edita, 4 vols. (Turin: Sumptibus et Typis Mame, 1949), 1:602. 12 Hymns Ancient & Modern Revised (London: William Clowes, no date), p. 192. 13 The English Hymnal. With Tunes, (1906; rev. and rpt. London: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 12. 14 John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Complete Poetical Works With the Explanatory Notes of Shelley's Poems by Mrs. Shelley (New York: Random House, no date), p. 493. 15 Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longman, 1969), p. 247. 16 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Including Poems and Versions of Poems Herein Published for the First Time, Edited with Textual and Bibliographical Notes, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London: Oxford University Press, 1912), p. 198. 17 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 117. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 18 George Crabbe, The Poetical Works of George Crabbe, ed. A. J. and R. M. Carlyle (London: Oxford University Press, 1908), p. 65. 19 Lord Alfred Douglas, "Two Loves" http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19366. 20 Norton Anthology (above, note 8), p. 407. 21 John Donne, The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 44. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference 22 Alexander Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text with Selected Annotations, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1963), p. 223. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 23 Norman Ault (ed.), Elizabethan Lyrics (1949; rpt. New York: Capricorn, 1960), p. 312. 24 Ibid., p. 486. 25 Andrew Marvell, The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, rev. Pierre Legouis and Elsie Duncan-Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 1:9. 26 George Herbert, The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), p. 166. 27 Hymns Ancient & Modern Revised (above, note 12), p. 356. 28 "Thou Whose Almighty Word." http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/t/h/thouwalm.htm. 29 H. W. Donner, Thomas Lovell Beddoes: The Making of a Poet (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1935), p. 111. 30 Christopher Ricks, Tennyson (London: Macmillan, 1972), p. 201.

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John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merrit Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957), p. 69. 32 Geoffrey Grigson, The Englishman's Flora Illustrated with Woodcuts from Sixteenth-Century Herbals, (1958; rpt. St Albans: Paladin, 1975), pp. 368-69. 33 Mario Bussagli, Bosch: The Life and Works of the Artist Illustrated with 80 Colour Plates (London: Thames and Hudson, 1967), p. 25. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 34 Margherita Abbruzzese, Goya: The Life and Work of the Artist Illustrated with 80 Colour Plates (London: Thames and Hudson, 1967), p. 35. 35 Arthur Jacobs and Stanley Sadie, The Pan Book of Opera (London: Pan Books, 1964), p. 219. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 36 The English Hymnal (above, note 13), p. 506. 37 Bruce Campbell, The Dictionary of Birds in Colour (London: Michael Joseph, 1974), p. 323. 38 M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953; rpt. New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1958), p. 51. 39 "Preface to the Second Edition of Several of the Foregoing Poems Published, With an Additional Volume, Under the Title of 'Lyrical Ballads', William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 735. 40 Chaucer (above, note 17), p. 84. 41 Utopia Limited in Sir W. S. Gilbert, The Savoy Operas Being the Complete Text of the Gilbert and Sullivan Operas as Originally Produced in the Years 1875-1896 (London: Macmillan, 1962), p. 615. 42 Rodney Stenning Edgecombe, "Operatic Sources for Death's Jest-book." Notes and Queries 55.4 (2008): 441-43. 43 Coleridge (above, note 16), p. 187. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 44 Shelley (above, note 14), p. 622. 45 Hans Christian Andersen, Fairy Tales and Legends (London: Bodley Head, 1942), p. 73. 46 Charles Dickens, Hard Times, intro. Dingle Foot (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 22. 47 Horace, The Odes and the Epodes, tr. C. E. Bennett (London: William Heinemann, 1968), pp. 278-79. 48 Louis Untermeyer (ed.), Collins Albatross Book of Verse: English and American Poetry from the Thirteenth Century to the Present Day (London: Collins, 1933), p. 462. 49 Nahum Tate, "Dido's Lament: Text." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dido's_Lament#Text. 50 Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, tr. William Harris Stahl (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), p. 89. 51 William Shakespeare, Sonnets, ed. John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), p. 39.

456

Notes

Chapter Ten: The Ivory Gate 1

Qtd. H. W. Donner, Thomas Lovell Beddoes: The Making of a Poet (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1935), p. 351. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 2 Virgil, Virgil with an English Translation by H. Rushton Fairclough, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1967) 1:570-71. 3 Thomas Lovell Beddoes, The Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ed. and intro. H. W. Donner (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. xxxvii. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 4 John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merrit Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957), p. 284. 5 John Donne, The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 45. 6 Alexander Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text with Selected Annotations, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1963), p. 221. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 7 Haydn, "The Mermaid's Song" in Mezzo-Soprano Songs, 2 vols. (London: Boosey and Hawkes, no date), 1:44. 8 Heinrich Heine, "Auf Flügeln des Gesanges." http://www.heinrichheine.net/fluegel.htm. 9 John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale," Poetical Works,ed. H. W. Garrod (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 207. 10 George Gordon, Lord Byron, Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page, rev. John Jump (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 390. 11 Leigh Hunt, The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt, ed. H. S. Milford (London: Oxford University Press, 1923), p. 322. 12 Will Ingwersen, Alpines (London: John Murray, 1991), p. 13. 13 Lucretius, De Rerum Natura,tr. W. H. D. Rouse (London: William Heinemann, 1924), pp. 22-23. 14 Roger Phillips, Wild Flowers of Britain: Over a Thousand Species by Photographic Identification (London: Pan Books, 1977), p. 28. 15 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Poetical Works (London: George Routledge, 1889), p. 270. 16 G. F. Handel, Semele: A Secular Oratorio Composed in the Year 1743: Abridged Concert Edition for Four Solo Voices, Chorus, and Orchestra Adapted from the Complete Edition of Ebenezer Prout (London: Novello, no date), pp. 51-52. 17 Paradise Lost, Book II, (above, note 4), p. 248. 18 Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, 2 vols. (London: J. M. Dent, 1925), 1:11. 19 Hunt (above, note 11), p. 22. 20 Keats (above, note 9), p. 5. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 21 Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longman, 1969), p. 835.

A Reader’s Guide to the Narrative and Lyric Poetry of Thomas Lovell Beddoes 22

457

"The Fisherman and His Wife," [Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm], Grimms' Fairy Tales (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1948), p. 28. 23 Ovid, Metamorphoses, tr. Frank Justus Miller, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1916), 1: 8-9. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 24 Catullus, Tibullus and Pervigilium Veneris, tr. F. W. Cornish, J. P. Postgate and J. W. Mackail (London: William Heinemann, 1968), pp. 7-9. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 25 Longus, Daphnis and Chloe, tr. and intro. Paul Turner (1956; rev. and rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 80. 26 Patrick Gale, Rough Music (London: Flamingo, 2000), p. 17. 27 Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d'Arthur. Sir Thomas Malory's Book of King Arthur and of His Noble Knights of the Round Table (Twickenham: Senate, 1998), p. 76. 28 J. A. Burrow, A Reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), p. 160. 29 Martial, Epigrams, ed. and tr. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 1:62-63. 30 Donne, (above, note 5), p. 62. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 31 "Preface to Argalus and Parthenia, qtd. in Helen Gardner, "Introduction," The Metaphysical Poets (1957; Rev. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 16. 32 Alfred. H. Miles (ed.), Fifty Songs of Scotland, with New Symphonies and Accompaniments by Ernest Miles (London: Hutchinson, no date), p. 1. 33 Ben Jonson, Poems of Ben Jonson, ed. and intro. George Burke Johnston (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954), p. 115. 34 Pope (above, note 6), p. 593. 35 H. R. Ellis Davidson, Gods and Myths of Northern Europe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), p. 26. 36 Hymns Ancient & Modern Revised (London: William Clowes, no date), p. 56. 37 John Keble, The Christian Year. Thoughts in Verse for the Sundays and Holydays Throughout the Year (London: Oxford University Press, no date), p. 51. 38 The English Hymnal. With Tunes, (1906; rev. and rpt. London: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 152. 39 Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry (1938; rev. and rpt. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), p. 288. 40 Geoffrey Grigson, The Englishman's Flora Illustrated with Woodcuts from Sixteenth-Century Herbals (1958; London: Paladin, 1975), p. 216. 41 Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, Jon Stallworthy (eds.), The Norton Anthology of Poetry (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), pp. 1071-72. 42 A Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church Together with the Form and Manner of Making, Ordaining and Consecrating of Bishops, Priests and Deacons Set Forth by Authority for Use in the Church of the Province of South Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 480.

458 43

Notes

Franz Schubert, Schubert-Album. Sammlung der Lieder für eine Singstimme mit Pianofortebegleitung, ed. Max Friedlaender, 6 vols. (Leipzig: C. F. Peters, no date), 1:243. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 44 John Hadfield (ed.), A Book of Delights: An Anthology of Words and Pictures Compiled by John Hadfield (London: Hulton Press, 1956), p. 136. 45 Daniel Ternois, François Boucher, tr. Anita Brookner (London: Purnell, 1966), p. 7. 46 Gertrude Grace Sill, A Handbook of Symbols in Christian Art (New York: Macmillan, 1975), p. 18. 47 Milton (above, note 4), p. 284. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 48 John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Complete Poetical Works With the Explanatory Notes of Shelley's Poems by Mrs. Shelley (New York: Random House, no date), p. 640. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 49 Mab van Lohuizen-Mulder, Raphael's Images of Justice-Humanity-Friendship: A Mirror of Princes for Scipione Borghese (Wassenaar: Miranada, 1977), pp. 1516. 50 Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1910), p. 135. 51 Norman Ault (ed.), Elizabethan Lyrics (1949; rpt. New York: Capricorn, 1960), p. 277. 52 Oliver Goldsmith The Vicar of Wakefield (London: Oxford University Press, 1901), p. 150. 53 George Herbert, The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), p. 87. 54 William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 127. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 55 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), p. 190. 56 Grigson (above, note 40), p. 430. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 57 H. G. Fiedler, H. G. (ed.), A Book of German Verse from Luther to Liliencron, Edited, with Introduction, Outlines of German Versification and Notes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916), p. 95. 58 W. H. Auden, Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957. (London: Faber, 1966), p. 142. 59 Tennyson (above, note 21), p. 834. 60 Thomas Gray, William Collins and Oliver Goldsmith, The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman, 1969), p. 463. 61 Alfred. H. Miles (ed.), Forty English Songs, with New Symphonies and Accompaniments by Ernest Miles (London: Hutchinson, no date), p. 30. 62 R. T. Davies (ed. and intro.), Medieval English Lyrics: A Critical Anthology, (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), p. 77. 63 Donne (above, note 5), p. 82.

A Reader’s Guide to the Narrative and Lyric Poetry of Thomas Lovell Beddoes 64

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Emily Dickinson, Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson's Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1964), p. 229. 65 Carl Maria von Weber, Oberon, Libretto Booklet for the DGG CD Recording: Stereo 419038-2, p. 57. 66 Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, 2 vols. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), 1:121. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 67 Edmund Spenser, Books I and II of The Faerie Queene, The Mutability Cantos and Selections from the Minor Poetry, ed Robert Kellogg and Oliver Steele (New York: Odyssey Press, 1965), p. 207. 68 Alan Halsey, "Introduction," Thomas Lovell Beddoes, The Ivory Gate: Later Poems and Fragments, ed. Alan Halsey (Hastings: ReScript Books, 2011), p. 13. 69 John Keats, Letters of John Keats: A New Selection, ed. Robert Gittings (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 157. 70 Qtd Robert Gittings, John Keats (1968; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 251. 71 Euripides, The Bacchae and Other Plays: Ion, The Women of Troy, Helen, The Bacchae, tr. Philip Vellacott (1954; rev. and rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 210. 72 Derek Stanford (ed.), Three Poets of the Rhymers' Club: Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, John Davidson (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1974), p. 50. 73 Hymns Ancient & Modern Revised (London: William Clowes, no date), p. 217. 74 Catullus (above, note 24), pp. 4-5. 75 William Cowper, Poetical Works, ed. H. S. Milford, rev. Norma Russell (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 353. 76 The Metaphysical Poets, ed. Helen Gardner (1957; rev. and rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 112. 77 Plutarch, "De Defectu Oraculorum (Ȇİȡ੿ IJ૵Ȟ ਫțȜİȜȠȚʌȩIJȦȞ ȋȡȘıIJȘȡȓȦȞ)," http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/De_defectu _oraculorum.html. 78 Henry Carey, 'Polly Peachum,' Poems on Several Occasions. The Third Edition, Much Enlarged (London, 1729), pp. 151-52. 79 Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, intro. Marcus Stone (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 33. 80 Dante, The Vision, or Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise of Dante Alighieri, tr. Henry Francis Cary (London: Frederick Warne, no date), p. 482. 81 The Norton Anthology (above, note 41), p. 1073. 82 Robert Browning, Browning: A Selection, ed. W. E. Williams (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954), p. 44. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 83 Shelley (above, note 48), p. 533. 84 Martial (above, note 29), 2:148-49. 85 Sir W. S. Gilbert, The Savoy Operas Being the Complete Text of the Gilbert and Sullivan Operas as Originally Produced in the Years 1875-1896 (London: Macmillan, 1962), p. 458. 86 Gray (above, note 60), p. 49. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 87 The Norton Anthology (above, note 41), p. 1043.

460

Notes

88

Graves (above, note 66), 1:125. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 89 W. Peacock (ed.), English Verse Chosen and Edited by W Peacock, 5 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1929) 2:437. 90 Plato, The Symposium, tr. Walter Hamilton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951), p. 63. 91 John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions Together with Death's Duel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959), p. 108. 92 Matthew Arnold, The Poems of Matthew Arnold 1840-1867, intro. Arthur Quiller-Couch (London: Oxford University Press, 1909), p. 135. 93 Fiedler (above, note 57), p. 84. 94 David Lambert, A Field Guide to Dinosaurs (New York: Avon, 1983), p. 207. 95 Charles Dickens, Bleak House, intro. Sir Osbert Sitwell (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), p. 1. 96 Dorling Kindersley Ltd (ed.), Reader's Digest Success with House Plants (Pleasantville, New York: The Reader's Digest Association, Inc., 1979), p. 181. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 97 Diana Ferguson, Myths Retold (London: Hamlyn, 1998), p. 54. 98 Quoted in Adrian Desmond, The Hot-Blooded Dinosaurs (London: Hutchinson, 1975), p. 113. 99 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Including Poems and Versions of Poems Herein Published for the First Time, Edited with Textual and Bibliographical Notes, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London: Oxford University Press, 1912), p. 297. 99 William Lindsay, The Great Dinosaur Atlas (London: Dorling Kindersley, 1991), p. 30. 100 Lambert (above, note 94), p. 131.

Chapter Eleven: Last Poems 1

Thomas Lovell Beddoes, The Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ed. and intro. H. W. Donner (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 153. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 2 Ovid, Ovid with An English Translation: Heroides and Amores, tr. Grant Showerman (London: William Heinemann, 1925), pp. 82-83. 3 Matthew Arnold, The Poems of Matthew Arnold 1840-1867, intro. Arthur Quiller-Couch (London: Oxford University Press, 1909), p. 401. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 4 John Keats, Poetical Works, ed. H. W. Garrod (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 207. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 5 Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, tr. Robert Graves (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), p. 143. 6 Kirsten Bradbury, Michelangelo, intro. Lucinda Hawkesley (Bath: Parragon, 2000), p. 204. 7 Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins, sel. and intro. W. H. Gardner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), p. 30.

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461

T. S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men," in The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1969), p. 85. 9 Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes, Selected Poems (London: Faber, 1962), p. 24. 10 William Dunbar, "Lament for the Makars" in The Middle Scots Poets, ed. A. M. Kinghorn (London: Edward Arnold, 1970), p. 125. 11 Thomas Gray, William Collins and Oliver Goldsmith, The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman, 1969), pp. 171-72. 12 "Imitations of Horace: Ep. II i," Alexander Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text with Selected Annotations, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1963), p. 645. 13 John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Complete Poetical Works With the Explanatory Notes of Shelley's Poems by Mrs. Shelley (New York: Random House, no date), p. 618. 14 Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d'Arthur. Sir Thomas Malory's Book of King Arthur and of His Noble Knights of the Round Table (Twickenham: Senate, 1998), p. 366. 15 George Herbert, The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), p. 59. 16 Homer, The Iliad, tr. E. V. Rieu (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950), p. 262. 17 Sir Walter Scott, The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. Complete in One Volume, intro. and annotated J. G. Lockhart (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1882), p. 36. 18 Thomas Gray, William Collins and Oliver Goldsmith, The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman, 1969), p. 642. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 19 George Gordon, Lord Byron, Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page, rev. John Jump (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 77. 20 Edmund Blunden, Leigh Hunt: A Biography (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1934), p. 64. 21 Leigh Hunt, The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt, ed. H. S. Milford (London: Oxford University Press, 1923), p. 144. 22 Gray (above, note 18), p. 176. 23 John Milton, "L'Allegro," in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merrit Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957), p. 71. 24 Shelley, "Preface" to "Adonais" (above, note 13), p. 484. 25 Virgil, Virgil with an English Translation by H. Rushton Fairclough, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1967) 1: 296-97. 26 Aldous Huxley, "Wordsworth in the Tropics," in Do What You Will: Essays by Aldous Huxley (London: Chatto and Windus, 1929), p. 128. 27 Anthony Hartley (ed.), The Penguin Book of French Verse 3: The Nineteenth Century With Plain Prose Translations of Each Poem (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), p. xxiii. 28 Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, intro. Marcus Stone (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 128. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference.

462 29

Notes

Huxley, "One and Many," (above, note 26), p. 31. William Blake, Blake: The Complete Poems: Second Edition, ed. W. H. Stevenson (1971; rpt. and rev. London: Longman, 1989), p. 213. 31 Pope, "Epistle to Bathurst" (above, note 12), p. 584. 32 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Including Poems and Versions of Poems Herein Published for the First Time, Edited with Textual and Bibliographical Notes, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London: Oxford University Press, 1912), p. 298. 33 Virgil, Eclogue II, (above, note 25), 1: 10-11. 34 Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Defence of Poetry" in D. J Enright and Ernst de Chickera (eds.) English Critical Texts 16th Century to 20th Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 255. 35 Robert Gittings, John Keats (1968; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 265. 36 Luigi Cherubini, Requiem Mass in C Minor for Four-Part Chorus of Mixed Voices with Piano Accompaniment (New York: Edwin F. Kalmus, no date), p. 22. 37 Qtd. in Edward Dent, Opera, (1940; rev. and rpt. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1949), p. 104. 38 William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 540. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference. 39 Horace, The Odes and the Epodes, tr. C. E. Bennett (London: William Heinemann, 1968), pp. 168-69. 40 Collins (above, note 18), p. 464. 41 Hartley (above, note 27), p. xxiii. 42 Aldous Huxley, "One and Many" (above, note 26), pp. 34-35. 43 Aldous Huxley, "Baudelaire" (above, note 26), p. 180. 44 William Cowper, Poetical Works, ed. H. S. Milford, rev. Norma Russell (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 183. 45 Allan Danzig, "An Unexpected Echo of Beddoes in Frost." Notes and Queries 10 (1963): 151. 46 Anya Taylor, "A Frost Debt to Beddoes." English Language Notes 13 (1976): 291-92. 47 Robert F. Fleissner, "From 'Wooed' to Wood?' A Frost Debt to Beddoes Reconsidered," English Language Notes 15 (1978): 209. 48 Anya Taylor, "A Reply to Robert Fleissner's 'From Wooed to Wood: A Frost Debt to Beddoes Reconsidered," English Language Notes 15 (1978): 210. 49 Rowland Smith, "Nadine Gordimer," in 20th-Century Fiction, intro. George Woodcock (London: Macmillan, 1983), p. 263. 50 Rodney Stenning Edgecombe, "An Allusion to Endymion in Beddoes's 'Phantom-Wooer.'" Notes and Queries 55.4 (2008): 440-41. 51 Richard Wilbur, New and Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1989), p. 332. 52 Norman Ault (ed.), Elizabethan Lyrics (1949; rpt. New York: Capricorn, 1960), p. 134. 53 Breviarium Romanum ex Decreto Sacrosancti Concilii Tridentini Restitutum S. Pii V Pontificis Maximi Jussu Editum Aliorumque Pontificum Cura Recognitum Pii 30

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Papae X Auctoritate Reformatum cum Nova Psalterii Translatione Pii Papae XII Jussu Edita, 4 vols. (Turin: Sumptibus et Typis Mame, 1949), 1:313. 54 John Keats, Letters of John Keats: A New Selection, ed. Robert Gittings (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 390. 55 Milton (above, note 23), p. 168. 56 Dante, The Vision, or Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise of Dante Alighieri, tr. Henry Francis Cary (London: Frederick Warne, no date), p. 3. 57 Cowper (above, note 44), p. 431. 58 Catullus, Tibullus and Pervigilium Veneris, tr. F. W. Cornish, J. P. Postgate and J. W. Mackail (London: William Heinemann, 1968), pp. 172-73. 59 Luciano Berti, All the Works of Michelangelo, tr. Susan Glasspool (Florence: Bonechi Editore, no date), p. 19. 60 Virgil (above, note 25), II: 58-59. 61 George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, no date), p. 363.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Texts Beddoes, Thomas Lovell. The Complete Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Ed. Sir Edmund Gosse. 2 vols. London: Fanfrolico Press, No Date. —.The Ivory Gate: Later Poems and Fragments. Ed. Alan Halsey. Hastings: ReScript Books, 2011. —. The Letters of Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Ed. with Notes by Edmund Gosse. London: Elkin Mathews & John Lane, 1894. —. The Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Ed. and Intro. H. W. Donner. London: Oxford University Press, 1935. —. Plays and Poems of Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Ed. H. W. Donner. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950. —. Selected Poems. Ed. Judith Higgens. Manchester: CarcanetPress,1976. Reeves, James (Ed.) Five Late Romantic Poets: George Darley, Hartley Coleridge, Thomas Hood, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Emily Brontë. London: Heinemann, 1974.

Secondary Texts Abbruzzese, Margherita. Goya: The Life and Work of the Artist Illustrated with 80 Colour Plates. London: Thames and Hudson, 1967. Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. 1953; Rpt. New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1958. Ackroyd, Peter. Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination. 1981; Rpt. London: Vintage, 2004. Addison, Joseph, Richard Steele and Others. The Spectator. 4 Vols. London: J. M. Dent, No Date. Addison, Joseph. The Works of Joseph Addison With Notes by Richard Hurd D.D. Lord Bishop of Worcester with Large Additions, Chiefly Unpublished. Ed. Henry G. Bohn. 6 vols. London: George Bell and Sons, 1902. Agar, John. "Isbrand and T. L. Beddoes' Aspiring Hero." Studia Neophilologica 45 (1973): 372-91. "All Things Bright and Beautiful," http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/a/l/allthing.htm.

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Altick, Richard D. The Art of Literary Research. New York: W. W. Norton, 1963. Andersen, Hans Christian. Fairy Tales and Legends. London: Bodley Head, 1942. Anon. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Ed. J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon. Rev. Norman Davis. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. Anon. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Tr. and Intro. Brian Stone. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959. Apollodorus. The Library with an English Translation by Sir James George Frazer. 2 vols. London: William Heinemann, 1921. Armstrong, James. "The 'Death Wish' in 'Stopping by Woods.'" Newsletter of the Thomas Lovell Beddoes Society 8 (2002): 11-12. Arnobius of Sicca. The Case Against the Pagans. Tr. and Annotated George E. McCracken. 2 vols. Westminster, Maryland: The Newman Press, 1949. Arnold, Matthew. The Poems of Matthew Arnold 1840-1867. Intro. Arthur Quiller-Couch. London: Oxford University Press, 1909. Auden, W. H. Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957. London: Faber, 1966. Ault, Norman (Ed.). Elizabethan Lyrics. 1949; Rpt. New York: Capricorn, 1960. Bach, Johan Sebastian The Passion of Our Lord According to S. Matthew. Ed. Edward Elgar and Ivor Atkins. London: Novello, No Date. Bacon, Francis. Selected Writings of Francis Bacon. Intro. Hugh G. Dick. New York: Random House, 1955. Baker, John Haydn. "'Georgium Sidus': Thomas Lovell Beddoes and the Discovery of Uranus." Notes and Queries 49.1 (March 2002): 46-47. —. "'Toms Laocoon': A Newly Discovered Poem by Thomas Lovell Beddoes." Victorian Poetry 40.3 (2002): 261-66. —. "Resurrecting Beddoes." The Thomas Lovell Beddoes Society Newsletter. 6 (2000): 4-5. Bamforth, Iain. "Pickled Essence of Englishman: Thomas Lovell Beddoes—Time to Unearth a Neglected Poet?" Journal of the Thomas Lovell Beddoes Society. 12 (2006): 14-19. Barlow, T. D. Woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1948. Baulch, David M. "'Death and his sweetheart': Revolution and Return in Death's Jest-Book" in The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Ed. Ute Berns and Michael Bradshaw. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007; 49-66.

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INDEX

Al-Farabi 18 ff. Allori, Allesandro 306 Andersen, Hans Christian 343 Apollodorus 225 Arnold, Matthew 389 Auden, W. H. 221 Augustine 150 Bach, Johan Sebastian 192, 348 Bacon, Francis 24 Barrett, Elizabeth 200 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell: Contempt for 'keepsake' poets 351 ff.,imperfect dramatic sense 1-3, 8, obsession with death 7-8, political beliefs 106 ff., 408, relationship with Bernard Reich 19 ff. Poems: "Alfarabi" 17-40, "The Boding Dreams" 34850, "By Two Voices" 19294, "The Comet" 106-08, Death's Jestbook 1-3, "Dedicatory Stanzas" 31721, "Dirge for Wolfram" 311-12," Dirge" 210-12, "Doomsday" 322-27 , "Dream Pedlary" 330-35, "Drinking Song" 184-85, Epitaph" 205, "From the German" 299-303, "Hymn from Scaroni" 10, The Improvisatore 45-105, "Isbrand's Revenge" 291-93, "Isbrand's Song" 287-91, The Ivory Gate 351-92, Letters in Verse 255-86, "Lines Written at Geneva" 207-10, "Lines Written in a

Blank Leaf of 'Prometheus Unbound'" 181-83, "Lines Written in Switzerland" 397-400, "Mandrake's Song" 335-37, "The New Cecilia" 337-40, "The Newborn Star" 15-17, "The New-born Star. Another Version" 40-44, "The Oviparous Tailor" 340-42, "Pygmalion" 225-54, Quatorzains 108-40, "The Romance of the Lily" 14477, "Song at Amala's Wedding" 308-10, "Song by Siegfried" 329-30, "Song from Eriphyle's Love", "Song from the Ship" 34245, "Song from Torrismond" 200-01, "Song of a Maid" 217-221, "Song on the Water" 305-07, "Song Translated from the German" 307-08, "Songs by the Deaths" 293-96, Songs from The Bride's Tragedy 185-92, "Songs from 'The Second Brother'" 212-14, "Sonnet to Tartar" 22124, "Sonnet to Zoë King" 196-98, "St Dunstan" 11-12, "Sybilla's Dirge" 310-11, "Threnody" 393-94, "To a Bunch of Grapes" 140-43, "To Agrippina" 194-96, "With Music" 216-17, "Within a Bower of Eglantine" 12-13, "The Warning" 345-47,

A Reader’s Guide to the Narrative and Lyric Poetry of Thomas Lovell Beddoes "Written in an Album in Clifton" 1, 5, 312-17 Beethoven, Ludwig von 61, 309, 325 Blake, William 35, 207 Bosch, Hieronymus 340 Botticelli, Sandro 289 Boucher, François 368 Breton, Nicholas 263 Bronzino, Agnolo 289 Browning, Robert 19, 28, 61, 384 Burns, Robert 149 Burton, Robert 95 Byron, George Gordon 37, 89, 186 Canning, George 106 ff. Caravaggio, Michelangelo 397 Casaubon, Meric 152 Catullus 187, 363 Cayot, Claude Augustin 186 Cerrito, Fanny 307 Chaucer, Geoffrey 51, 170, 249, 273 Chopin, Frederick 69 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 48, 135, 228, 243, 328, 349, 405 Collins, William 126, 163, 189, 202, 216, 376, 408 Conan-Doyle, Arthur 389 Constable, John 48 Correggio, Antonio 75 Cowley, Abraham 151, 266 Cowper, William 221, 276, 382, 416 Crabbe, George 97 Crashaw, Richard 123 Dali, Salvador 33, 296 Daniel, Samuel 57 Dante, 15, 77, 298, 383, 416 Delacroix, Eugène 12 Dickens, Charles 11-12, 24, 30, 57, 90, 229-30, 244, 256, 305, 315, 354, 383, 390, 403 Dickinson, Emily 377 Diogenes 184 Donne, John 16, 123, 208, 244, 311, 329, 364

491

Dowson, Ernest 381 Dryden, John 16, 56 Dürer, Albrecht 189 Dyer, John 77 Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans) 418 Eliot, T. S. 234, 354 Elizabeth I 277 Epicurus 28 Euripides 164 Gale, Patrick 362 Gautier, Théophile 55, 109 Gilbert, W. S. 166, 269, 294, 385 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 87, 10102, 202, 227, 250, 267, 373, 389 Goldsmith, Oliver 8, 311, 400 Goya, Francisco 337 Gray, Thomas 28, 50, 82, 189, 270, 286, 324, 385, 400 Gunn, Thom 397 Hadrian 282 Hardy, Thomas 210 Haydn, Joseph 80 Heine, Heinrich 359 Herbert, George 38, 119, 140, 155, 211, 239 Herrick, Robert 79 Hillern, Wilhelmine von 357 Hitchcock, Alfred 352 Hokusai 115, 167 Holbein, Hans 86 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 252 Hood, Thomas 61 Homer 81, 89 Hopper, Edward 344 Horace 101, 138, 146, 240 Housman, Alfred 367 Hugo, Victor 184, 253 Hunt, Leigh 90, 131, 135, 379 Jonson, Ben 244, 268

492 Keats, John 4, 6, 58, 68, 84, 116, 129, 202, 236, 257, 319, 372, 387 Keble, John 153, 366 King, Henry 382 Klimt, Gustav 112 Lewis, Matthew 45-46 Longus 361 Lucretius 232, 243 Macrobius 26, 349 Mallory, Sir Thomas 398 Marlowe, Christopher 85, 268 Martial 363 Marschner, Heinrich 101 Marvell, Andrew 38, 95, 197, 331 Mauriac, François 46 Melissus 94 Mendelssohn, Felix 178 Merimée, Prosper 50 Meyerbeer, Giacomo 166, 342, 408 Milman, Henry 244 Milton, John 14-15, 17, 24, 33, 4142, 64, 169, 211, 257, 259, 291, 352, 369 Molnar, Franz 211 Moore, Thomas 220 More, Thomas 282 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 12, 247 Offenbach, Jacques 2 Ossian 50 Ovid 14, 35, 59, 68, 128, 141, 146, 225 ff., 360, 393 Owen, Richard 391 Parker, Dorothy 288 Percy, Thomas 50 Plato 157, 229, 262 Plotinus 26 Pope, Alexander 23, 36, 97, 129, 155, 172, 217, 253, 304, 336, 352, 408 Poussin, Nicolas 130 Procter, Bryan 9, 255 ff.

Index Pugin, Augustus 48 Quintilian 130 Radcliffe, Ann 135, 300 Raleigh, Walter 277 Raupach, Ernst 299 Reich, Bernard 18ff. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 225 ff., 242 Schlegel, Friedrich 32 Schober, Franz von 134 Scott, Sir Walter 100, 399 Seneca 390 Shakespeare, William: All's Well that EndsWell 142; Antony and Cleopatra 212; As You Like It 149, 238, 285, 336, 401, 412; Cymbeline 8, 12, 258; Hamlet 191, 206, 213, 235, 280, 285, 334, 380; Julius Caesar 139; King Henry VI Part 1 79, 205; King Henry VI Part 3 380; King Henry VIII 192; King Lear 92, 251, 412; Love's Labour's Lost 63, 359, 394; Macbeth 12, 30, 97, 127, 174, 185, 239, 410; Measure for Measure 187, 333; Othello 288, 330; The Merchant of Venice 92, 149, 239, 318; A Midsummer Night's Dream 13, 82, 124, 149, 188, 199, 216, 235, 256, 264, 273, 295, 312, 337, 355, 359, 402, 413; Much Ado About Nothing 193, 337; Richard II 25, 62; Romeo and Juliet 28, 45; The Tempest 62, 218, 293, 322-24, 354, 413; Troilus and Cressida 37778; Twelfth Night 213, 297, 329, 337, 388; The Two

A Reader’s Guide to the Narrative and Lyric Poetry of Thomas Lovell Beddoes Gentlemen of Verona 66; The Winter's Tale 330 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 71, 112, 170, 180 ff., 280, 303, 370, 410 Shirley, George 259 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 57 Smart, Christopher 221 Southey, Robert 9, 87 Spenser, Edmund 54, 83, 189, 272, 379, 401 Statius 13 Strauss, Johann 284 Suckling, Sir John 329 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 384 La Sylphide 102

Traherne, Thomas 101

Tchaikovsky, Peter 49, 191 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 70, 141, 256, 327, 375 Thomson, James 54

Xenophanes 94

493

Virgil 81, 89, 174, 183, 298, 301, 417 Wagner, Richard 184 Walpole, Horace 47 Watteau, Antoine 120 Weber, Carl Maria von 42, 269 West, Benjamin 194 White, Patrick 133 Wilbur, Richard 162 Wilde, Oscar 108-09, 244 Woolf, Virginia 168 Wordsworth, William 58, 136, 236, 317, 408

Yeats, William Butler 327