Song of the Stygian Naiades -- Thomas Lovell Beddoes

Guest poem submitted by Catherine Pegg:

I haven't seen much Beddoes on your (excellent) site, so I thought I'd
contribute some:

(Poem #1542) Song of the Stygian Naiades 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 comes home nightly, laden, Underneath his broad bat-wing, With a gentle, mortal maiden? Is it so? Wind, is it so? All that you and I do know Is, that we saw fly and fix 'Mongst the reeds and flowers 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. Proserpine may weep in rage, But, ere I and you have done Kissing, bathing in the sun, What I have in yonder cage, Bird or serpent, wild or tame, She shall guess and ask in vain; But, if Pluto does't again, It shall sing out loud his shame. What hast caught then? What hast caught? Nothing but a poet's thought, Which so light did fall and fix 'Mongst the reeds and flowers 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. -- Thomas Lovell Beddoes

Notes:  Pluto is the Roman God of the Dead (known on the Greek side as
Hades).  One of his stories is about his kidnapping of Proserpina, Goddess
of Spring, and his marriage of her.  The Styx is the river separating the
living world from the Land of the Dead, and a Naiad is a young lady with no
kit on who lives in a river, possibly drowning people.  The Furies are three
very scary ladies whose business was vengeance on oathbreakers and
kinslayers, and Cupid (Eros) is the Roman God of Love.

Why do I love this poem?  Is it the hilarity sneaking out of a mythological
theme?  The visuality and oddity of the Furies making a bed for the tiger
cubs?  The lovely metrical scanning and rhyme that characterises Beddoes'
work?  All of them, I guess.

Beddoes is known for his gory, macabre poetry, but he also did some
wonderful love songs, too.  Here's another one that I like:

 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.

 How many times do I love again?
   Tell me how many beads there are
        In a silver chain
        Of evening rain,
 Unravelled from the tumbling main,
   And threading the eye of a yellow star:
 So many times do I love again.

It had these beautiful images, and this nice tight metre that we just don't
see anymore, dammit.  Poetry took a turn for the worse when poets stopped
rhyming.  Not that there haven't been some wonderful free-verse poems, but
it encourages laziness and sloppy technique.  Sorry for the rant, there,
it's a pet peeve of mine.

I think there was an anniversary or festival for Beddoes last year, though
don't quote me on that.  His life and death were sad, macabre, and funny
which, considering his poems, he might have approved of.

All the best,
Cat.

Dream-Pedlary -- Thomas Lovell Beddoes

Thanks to Ira Cooper for suggesting today's poem

(Poem #1253) Dream-Pedlary 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 rang the bell, What would you buy? A cottage lone and still, With bowers nigh, Shadowy, my woes to still, Until I die. Such pearls 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 should 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! -- Thomas Lovell Beddoes

Note:
  Passing Bell (The): It now means the bell tolled to announce the death of
  one who has died in the parish; but originally it meant the bell which
  announced that the person was in extremis, or passing from time into
  eternity.
    -- [broken link] http://www.bootlegbooks.com/Reference/PhraseAndFable/data/947.html

As Hamlet put it in his famous soliloquy

  To die -- to sleep --
  To sleep? perchance, to dream. Ay, there's the rub;
  For in that sleep of Death what dreams may come,
  When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
  Must give us pause.
        -- Shakespeare, 'Hamlet'

and it is the same parallel between sleep and death, dreams and the
afterlife, that Beddoes addresses in today's poem. And addresses well -
there's a surprising density of images and concepts, and they shift and
blend seamlessly and with a deceptive air of uncraftedness.

The tone, too, exhibits that same smooth variation. "If there were dreams to
sell, what would you buy?" - a happy, innocent opening that is at once
darkened by the reference to a passing bell, then softened once more by the
"rose leaf" (interesting that he didn't say 'rose petal'), so that by the
time Beddoes says "merry and sad" he has indeed foreshadowed both types of
dream. This shifting mood continues throughout, though shifting is perhaps
not the word - what it does is build up a coherent whole by adding to it
from various directions. And even that carries an unfair suggestion of
haphazardness - there is definitely a clean logical progression running
through the poem, for all its back-and-forth moods.

Actually, the first thing that came to mind when I read the opening lines of
the poem was the ending of Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the
Command Line"[1]. In a mild flight of fancy, Stephenson speculates briefly
on the ability to design your life down to the last detail, and notes that
people will, in general, fly the complexity and seek refuge in ever-simpler
prepackaged lives, which they'll spend complaining that things don't work
the way they want them to. And what, I hear you ask, does this have to do
with the poem? Well, there seems to be something awfully *passive* about
buying a dream - and something boringly generic, too, about 'a dream' as
opposed to 'your dreams'. Of course, the rest of the poem doesn't support
this jaundiced interpretation, but that first impression did colour my
reading a bit.

And returning briefly to the 'mood swing' theme, note the interesting
ambivalence with which the poem treats death - everything from a price to
pay, through a lotus-eater's fantasy, to a genuine opportunity for 'dreams
made true'. The biography attached to Poem #595 mentions that Beddoes had "an
obsession with death that was to dominate his life and work", and that is
certainly very much in evidence here.

[1] which everyone ought to read. Really.
    http://www.spack.org/index.cgi/CommandLine

martin

The Last Man -- Thomas Lovell Beddoes

We seem to have stumbled our way into a new theme: the supernatural and the
macabre. Herewith, a guest poem submitted by Ira Cooper- an excerpt from:

(Poem #595) The Last Man By heaven and hell, and all the fools between them, I will not die, nor sleep, nor wink my eyes, But think myself into a god; old Death Shall dream he has slain me, and I'll creep behind him, Thrust off the bony tyrant from his throne And beat him into dust. Or I will burst Damnation's iron egg, my tomb, and come Half damned, ere they make lightning of my soul, And creep into thy carcase as thou sleepest Between two crimson fevers. I'll dethrone The empty skeleton, and be thy death, A death of grinding madness. -- Fear me now; I am a devil, not a human soul -- -- Thomas Lovell Beddoes

Thomas Lovell Beddoes, who wrote the above, wrote in the style of the
Elizabethan Revival of the Late Romantic Period.  I would call his style
macabre.  Born in 1803, he was the son of a famous physician.  He would have
been familiar with the anatomy table.  He was an acquaintence of Mary
Shelley.  Part of his final words:  "Food for what I am good for - worms."
If people are familiar with him at all, it might be because of one of his
more famous pieces, "Old Adam the Carrion Crow."

Ira Cooper.

[Bio]

        b. June 30, 1803, Clifton, Somerset, Eng.
        d. Jan. 26, 1849, Basel, Switz.

The son of a distinguished scientist, Beddoes seems early to have acquired,
from his father's dissections and speculations on anatomy and the soul, an
obsession with death that was to dominate his life and work. He was educated
at Charterhouse, where his passion for the drama became evident and where he
nourished his imagination on 18th-century Gothic romances. In 1820 he went
to Oxford University, where he wrote his first considerable work, The
Bride's Tragedy (1822), based on the story of a murder committed by an
undergraduate. In 1825 he went to Göttingen, Ger., to study anatomy and
medicine. There he continued work on Death's Jest-Book. Friends who read the
first version advised revision, and Beddoes' acceptance of their advice
hindered his poetic development: for the rest of his life he was unable to
escape from the work or to complete it, and it was eventually published
posthumously in 1850.

In Death's Jest-Book itself, which Beddoes described as an example of "the
florid Gothic," he aimed to use Gothic material to discuss the problems of
mortality and immortality.

After trouble with the university authorities, Beddoes left Göttingen, moved
to Würzburg (where he received his M.D.), and there involved himself in
radical politics. More trouble caused him to leave Germany for Zürich, where
his interest in writing English verse waned. In 1840 he had to flee from
Switzerland, probably for political reasons, and he never afterward settled
in one place for very long. He visited England for the last time in 1846-47.
Two years later he committed suicide.

        -- EB