Thomas Lovell Beddoes
Could never walk through meadows
Without getting the glooms
And thinking of tombs.
W. H. AUDEN: Academic Graffiti
His father was a doctor whose patients included Coleridge, Wordsworth and Southey, with all of whom he was on friendly terms. His mother’s sister was the prolific novelist Maria Edgeworth – small wonder, therefore, that Thomas turned to literature. Like his idol, Shelley (‘Song: Old Adam the carrion crow’ from Death’s Jest-Book is his undergraduate reaction to Shelley’s death), he was adept at writing songs. Having studied medicine at Pembroke College, Oxford, Beddoes published his first volume of verse and drama, The Improvisatore (1821) while still a freshman. The Brides’ Tragedy, a play, followed in 1822, and Death’s Jest-Book, or The Fool’s Tragedy was begun in 1825, though not published until 1850, a year after his death by suicide. He spent much of his short life abroad in Germany and Switzerland, attending various universities, reading German poetry and involving himself in revolutionary politics. Death’s Jest-Book shows Beddoes’s interest in the macabre, his obsession with the supernatural – a tendency that prompted Symons to compare him with Baudelaire and Poe: ‘there is not a page without its sad, grotesque, gay or abhorrent imagery of the tomb …’ ‘Dream-pedlary’ was written in 1829–30 and first published in The Poems, Posthumous and Collected, of Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1851), edited by his lifelong friend and literary executor Thomas Kelsall. Edmund Gosse, in his edition of the poems, calls it the ‘most exquisite’ of Beddoes’s poems: ‘for once Beddoes speaks with the voice of the living who yearn for the dead, rather than that of the dead yearning toward life.’ Having attempted suicide in 1848 by slashing an artery in his leg with a razor – an injury which necessitated amputation below the knee – the lonely, brilliant, gay Beddoes, with an imagination as haunting as Baudelaire’s and Poe’s, finally poisoned himself at the age of forty-five. The suicide took place in Basel – something he had perhaps predicted in the lines ‘Down from the Alps Paracelsus came,/To dance with death at Basel’. He left a suicide note resting on his breast that betrays his own ghoulishness and gift for self-parody: ‘I am food for what I am good for – worms […] Love […] to Kelsall whom I beg to look at my MSS – and print or not as he thinks fit. I ought to have been among other things a good poet; Life was too great a bore on one peg & that a bad one.’
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 rose-leaf down.
If there were dreams to sell,
Merry and sad to tell,
And the crier rung the bell,
What would you buy?
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.
But there were dreams to sell
Ill didst thou buy;
Life is a dream, they tell,
Waking, to die.
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?
If there are ghosts to raise,
What shall I call,
Out of hell’s murky haze,
Heaven’s blue pall?
Raise my loved long-lost boy
To lead me to his joy. –
There are no ghosts to raise;
Out of death lead no ways;
Vain is the call.
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!]
(Busch, Crist, van Dieren, Gibbs, Ireland)