Thomas Lovell Beddoes is a poet who exists between worlds, a belated Romantic, a proto‐Modern. Continual efforts to raise his poetic profile have been made, and yet he seems obstinately to fail to enter the mainstream of poetry in English, as he uncannily predicts in his death‐note: ‘I am food for what I am good for – worms … I ought to have been among other things a good poet.’1 He was more than ‘a good poet’, but often one whose poetic virtues demonstrate themselves as a questioning of ambition, wish, and desire, and through what Michael Bradshaw calls ‘a deeply ambivalent attitude to a reader’s wish for imaginative completion and fusion’.2
His great lyric ‘Dream‐Pedlary’ evokes and mocks the activity of peddling dreams, a veiled reference to writing poems for an indifferent audience. Its prosody and haunting rhyming, often monorhyming, create a miniature drama in five stanzas. A voice asks the speaker in the first stanza which dreams he would buy, ‘If there were dreams to sell’, spelling out the differences between kinds of dreams, some grave, some light, some ‘Merry and sad’, finally all blurring into the one composite form. The opening ‘If’ transmits a chord of plangent conditionality – half‐lament, half‐sardonic grimace – through the stanza, a note that amplifies its music in the triple rhyme that appears only in the first stanza (in which there are ten lines, the other four each having nine lines): ‘If there were dreams to sell’, says Beddoes, reprising his lyric’s first line, ‘Merry and sad to tell, / And the crier rung the bell, / What would you buy?’ The penultimate line does much to deepen the poem’s emotional impact. This, one feels, is the reason for the extra line, the thought of a crier ringing a bell to communicate news – as though he were calling out that there were dreams to sell, but also as though he were announcing a death, perhaps of the dream‐pedlar (Beddoes’s mocking equivalent to the pedlar who stands for robust good living and high thinking in Wordsworth's The Excursion). The thought of a ‘passing bell’ tolls through the stanza and the poem.
In the second stanza the speaker voices a wish for a subjective retreat into nature, living in ‘A cottage lone and still’. In the third the voices entangle: the speaker addresses himself as ‘thou’ and rebukes himself as falling into the trap of prizing mere dreams, before he switches to ‘I’ and takes seriously what he’d seemed to pour scorn on, namely the idea of ‘wishing ghosts to rise’. The movingly Orphic fourth stanza imagines the poet raising the ghost of ‘my loved longlost boy’ (among the clearest textual evidence that Beddoes nursed a deep homosexual passion, possibly for Bernhard Reich with whom he lived for a year in Göttingen), until it comes back to earth with a monosyllable bump:
There are no ghosts to raise;
Out of death lead no ways;
Vain is the call.
The bareness and terseness of these lines, along with the poem’s bewitching melody, typify Beddoes’s lyric power, evident too in the graceful acquiescence of the fifth and final stanza, in which the speaker recommends that a quiet death is the best medicine for hopeless hope, but does so in the context of seeing and accepting that the pursuit of ghosts is the price paid by love. The art, pathos, and tragic insight of this fine poem are equally impressive.
Although Beddoes looks back to the devices and concerns of Elizabethan lyricism and Jacobean tragedy, he is no mere pasticheur. Rather, he is able to use echoes and illusions with a creative, ironic intelligence. His poetry attracted the approval of Ezra Pound, for whom he was ‘the prince of morticians’ (Canto LXXX);3 it sings with a reckless poetic life of its own, a life that derives in part from the poetry’s preoccupation with death and the liminally spectral states surrounding it. Spirit is at war with mortal flesh throughout his work, even as he speculates darkly about a physical organ of resurrection:
a seed‐shaped bone,
Aldabaron, called by the Hebrews Luz,
Which, being laid into the ground, will bear
After three thousand years the grass of flesh,
The bloody, soul‐possessed weed called man. (Death’s Jest‐Book 3.3.456–60)
Spoken by the ambivalent figure of Ziba, half sage, half necromantic villain, the lines exemplify the monodramatic nature of Beddoes’s maverick Romantic play; ‘a sort of spectral dramatic fantasia’ is Arthur Symons’s description of the work.4 Yet if a spectral aura surrounds its language, hand in hand with a sense that the dramatis personae are all ventriloquizing variations on a single poetic voice, there is a pungent physicality too in the writing.
In the lines above, Beddoes wields a sonorous pentameter made to hold clashing registers and inflections. Here, the reference to ‘Luz’ lifts the tone on to a plane that’s Hebraic and solemn, even as the word and the idea of grotesque resurrection it betokens seem on the edge of being what Beddoes in a letter calls ‘an excellent joke’ (p. xxxviii).
The sardonic, weightily stressed last line of the quoted passage suggests how he thrives on the jar of contraries. Man is ‘bloody’ in that he’s physically and metaphorically ‘bloody’; he’s ‘soul‐possessed’ in that he possesses, and is possessed by the idea of, a soul; and if traditionally all flesh is grass Beddoes sardonically finds in that truism grounds for the notion of human beings as a ‘weed’, the chime with ‘seed‐shaped’ reminding us yet again of this poet’s constant way of bringing together yearning and mockery.
Such a compounding, leavened with macabre irony, emerges in the lyric, ‘Squats on a toad‐stool under a tree / A bodiless childfull of life, in the gloom, / Crying with frog voice, “What shall I be?”’ (3.3.328–30). Isbrand offers this as his genre‐subverting version of a Romantic kind (‘I hate your ballads that are made to come / Round like a squirrel’s cage, and round again’, 3.3.324–5), and certainly it avoids anything like mechanical circularity as its imagined speaker occupies a strange zone between foetal anomaly and Romantic ur‐ or counter‐poem questing for a new mode of being, crying ‘“What shall I be?”’. In a fascinating reading, Ute Berns explores the width and depth of Beddoes’s lyrical intellectualism in the poem, bringing out ways in which it ‘highlights’, from the perspective of an informed interest in new biological sciences, ‘the grotesque creativity of “life”’, and questions ‘idealist assumptions about the course of the history of mankind’.5 Beddoes the poet of soul and spirit is also the poet of body and matter, of embryological fantasy and haphazard evolutionary tendencies. Indeed the poem crackles with zestful, slightly revolted physicality. Yet it is, for all its interest in science, imagined as the product of ‘A bodiless childfull of life in the gloom’, where ‘gloom’ edges towards metaphor, rather as it does in Hardy’s later poem about loss of religious belief, ‘The Oxen’, which finishes, ‘I should go with him in the gloom, / Hoping it might be so’ (11–12).6 The fact that the poem is so metapoetic, followed as it is by Siegfried’s and Isbrand’s glosses (‘’tis perhaps a little / Too sweet and tender’, says the latter out of a twisted, good‐humoured corner of his mouth, ‘but that is the fashion’ (376–7)), allows us to see it as a self‐proclaimed ‘new Dodo’ (373), delightedly cancelling its own exhilarating if strained life.
Poetic strains in Beddoes are often, quite consciously, strained, as though he were conceding his inability to write in any available idiom; questing for something new, he, self‐mockingly, declares his own originality to be instantly obsolete. Frequently it is when imagining the dead, though, that Beddoes’s verse comes most alive, as in Siegfried’s explanation of why haunting is out of fashion, now that so many have gone over to death:
But now great cities are transplanted thither,
Memphis, and Babylon, and either Thebes,
And Priam’s towery town with its one beech. (3.3.399–401)
Again taking a leaf out of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, Beddoes offers his own version of the shadow‐world conjured into being by Earth in Act 1 of Shelley’s lyrical drama, finding a feisty, memorable embodiment for what Shelley calls ‘Dreams and the light imaginings of men’ (1.200). In that last detail, he releases the Romantic obsession with singularity, apparent in Wordsworth’s line, ‘But there’s a Tree, of many one’ (‘Ode. Intimations of Immortality’, 51), into his poetry’s highly singular form of ghost‐ridden life.
At one point in Death’s Jest‐Book, Isbrand, the cynical yet beguilingly intrepid and candid anti‐hero, addresses himself as a ‘tragic fool’, telling himself, with a nonchalant command of ordinary idiom, to ‘Cheer up’. If he is ‘alone’, ‘Why, so should be / Creators and destroyers’ (1.1.207–9). That casual coupling suggests the work’s closeness to Romantic irony, the idea that creativity exhibits itself most compellingly in the act of destroying its own productions. Throughout the work, characters destroy what they love and destroy because they love, as when, in the central action of the play as revenge tragedy, the Duke murders Wolfram, less because the latter loves Sibylla than because he inflicts the humiliation of forgiveness on the Duke. The work is alert to the dynamics of sibling hatreds and loves, and has more insight psychologically than is sometimes allowed.
At his most Romantically transcendent, as in his poem in praise of Shelley, ‘Lines Written in a Blank Leaf of the Prometheus Unbound’, Beddoes imagines a poetic triumph over the material world. In these lines Beddoes utters a chant of affirmation in praise of his immediate forebear’s creative achievement: Shelley was like a ‘providence’, whose ‘Angelic sounds / Alive with panting thoughts sunned the dim world’, where intertextual references handsomely acknowledge the vision of a poet who sought to bring libertarian light to what Shelley calls ‘this dim world’ (‘Ode to Liberty’, 227). Normally, however, such longing for transcendence betrays itself as death‐dealing, macabre or parodic. In the 1829 version of Death’s Jest‐Book, discussed here, the version Beddoes sent to friends in England who deflatingly advised against publication, there is, running through the mechanism of the revenge tragedy plot, a suggestion that the poem itself is subtly dangerous. When Wolfram’s ghost speaks with Sibylla, she conjures him to
Speak as at first you did: there was in the words
A mystery and music, which did thaw
The hard old rocky world into a flood,
Whereon a swan‐drawn boat seemed at my feet
Rocking on its blue billows … (4.2.47–51)
Her exhortation deploys images drawn from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound 2.5, in lyrics such as ‘My soul is an enchanted boat’. Beddoes’s effects are knowingly self‐referential and allusive. He evokes the primal rapture of Romantic poetry here, its ability to turn ‘The hard old rocky world into a flood’ available for song and harmony. But such an evocation contends with a different, harsher recognition, a sense that human imaginings may be illusory and tempt their creators and auditors towards states of death and oblivion. Again there are sources in Shelley, whose darkest work The Cenci, admired greatly by Beddoes, finds its way into Wolfram’s warning reply:
Listen not to me, look not on me more,
I have a fascination in my words,
A magnet in my look, which drags you downwards,
From hope and life. (64–7)
That ‘fascination’ is serpent‐like, treacherous; it intimates the power of ‘words’ to drag the listener ‘downwards’, destroying ‘hope and life’. Count Cenci, imagining the corruption of his daughter, says parenthetically that ‘what she most abhors / Shall have a fascination to entrap / Her loathing will’ (4.1.85–7), and Beddoes adapts that sadistic inflection to his own more insinuating hints of ‘fascination’ with death. Wolfram’s warning only increases Sibylla’s fascination with ‘death’, depicted by her lyrically as a means of achieving a pleasing loss of self: ‘let me pass praying away into thee, / As twilight still does into starry night’ (4.2.128–9). The extended vowel music of ‘praying away’ is characteristic of Beddoes’s impulse and ability to create rhythms that embody feeling.
Moving between states, then, Beddoes’s poetry encompasses a host of possible meanings: literary, personal, psychological, political, national. His poetry’s despair is the reflex of a barely acknowledged radical hope; his cultural aloneness speaks of a wish to set going a dialectic between two cultures, England and Germany. He belongs to a period when revolutionary ardour seemed largely to have been repressed, but in his non‐conforming, often unruly conduct and in his sympathy for the cause of freedom and liberty, he maintains at an unpropitious time and in however ironized a form ideals championed by Byron and Shelley.
The motif of resurrection is potent in Beddoes. ‘The buried, dead, and slain / Rise again’ in a late lyric (‘Song from the Waters’) inserted into the much‐revised and incrementally enlarging Death’s Jest‐Book. That claim and ambiguous hope make his work far other than the morbidly lugubrious curiosity it is sometimes represented as being. There is an evidently buoyant sense of hitting the target in Auden’s witty clerihew, ‘Thomas Lovell Beddoes / Could never walk through meadows / Without getting the glooms / And thinking of tombs’.7 But ‘Song from the Waters’ bears witness to a dynamic energy that pushes its force through dimeters that are simultaneously post‐mortal, almost brutally impersonal, and vibrant with life. The final stanza reveals the poem’s pressure to make words the seeds of a form of future life:
As wake the morning
Trumpets bright;
As snowdrop, scorning
Winter’s might,
Rises warning
Like a sprite:
The buried, dead, and slain
Rise again.
Those ‘morning / Trumpets’ seem more metaphorical than literal; possibly they refer to the trumpet‐shapes of flowers. Certainly they recall Shelley’s ‘trumpet of a prophecy’ (69) in ‘Ode to the West Wind’. Because of the extreme compression of such effects, the ‘sense of the piece’, as Bradshaw notes, ‘is at first confusing, hard to grasp’.8 And not merely ‘at first’ since the syntactical pressure is great, setting emblematic ‘snowdrop’ (minus any article, as in some proto‐Modernist impatience with such a thing) against ‘Winter’s might’ and making ‘The buried, dead, and slain’ both different categories and, in Bradshaw’s phrase, ‘a pregnant synonymity’ as ‘the list works backwards’.9 The final ‘Rise again’ rhymes ruefully with ‘slain’; men are ‘slain’, die, and are buried, before, as in some natural cycle, they inevitably ‘Rise again’. But if that cyclical process involves death, often of a violent kind, it also promises recurrence, even if that new vitality is often admonitory, spectral, a near‐grotesque simulacrum of Romantic renewal.