A couple of months ago I went down to Broadcasting House to be interviewed by Brian Patten about the poet A.S.J. Tessimond. The recording of this programme, the first in the new series of Lost Voices, is broadcast this Sunday at 4:30 on Radio Four.
For several years now, Arthur Seymour John Tessimond (John to his friends) has been a presence in my life, as I’ve tried to assemble the few remaining pieces of information about him. The Lost Voices programme turns to him for this reason — it seems remarkable that a man who died not even fifty years ago might have disappeared so successfully into the ether.
In some ways remarkable; in others, perhaps, not so: “I am the unnoticed, the unnoticeable man”, he wrote, in one of his best-known poems, ‘The Man in the Bowler Hat’. Best-known is a strange term to use in relation to Tessimond, but this is the great contradiction of his reputation — he is perhaps Britain’s best-loved unknown poet. His poems are widely anthologised, and frequently requested on Radio Four’s Poetry Please; his poem ‘Cats’ appeared for several years as a text on the National Curriculum; he has even had several mentions in the advice columns of the Daily Mail — though a figure less fitting with that newspaper’s ethos would be hard to find.
Despite this, he cannot really be said to be a household name.
In the opening moments of the 1961 Galton and Simpson film The Rebel, Tony Hancock, furnished with bowler hat and umbrella, boards a train, and looks about the compartment to take in seven other identically dressed figures. It is a scene almost identical to that described in Tessimond’s poem of 1947:
I am the unnoticed, the unnoticeable man:
The man who sat on your right in the morning train:
The man you looked through like a windowpane:
The man who was the colour of the carriage, the colour of the mounting
Morning pipe smoke.
The bowler hat in both film and poem serves as an emblem of uniformity. Like Magritte’s The Son of Man, like Beckett’s Didi and Gogo, it gives a sense of ubiquity to the wearer; we assume the man in the bowler hat to be everyman. While Hancock’s man-in-the-bowler-hat seeks to break free and become an individual, Tessimond’s merely knows of the possibility of this freedom, now a passed moment.
Many of Tessimond’s poems adopt this voice — as Hubert Nicholson, his literary executor, pointed out:
He has a number of poems beginning “I am”, but they are not in the least egotistical. They are imaginative projections of himself into types, places, generalised Man, even God or Fate.
Tessimond is an everyman poet, and this perhaps accounts for much of his popularity. He is able to speak about the common experience in language that is accessible to most readers.
Yet there is something else at work here too, because for all its openness there is also something guarded — even private — in this public, published writing. In his poem ‘London’ he adopts this universal ‘I’ to describe the capital as ‘the city of two divided cities’ but this division seems to run to the heart of the man himself:
I am the reticent, the private city,
The city of lovers hiding wrapped in shadows,
The city of people sitting and talking quietly
Beyond shut doors and walls as thick as a century,
People who laugh too little and too loudly,
Whose tears fall inward, flowing back to the heart.
‘Reticent’. ‘Private’. These qualities seem pertinent in much of the poet’s work. He writes of rooms, and walls, and barriers, and locked boxes under floorboards. As here, in ‘Unlyric Love Song’:
A document kept at the back of a drawer,
A tin hidden under the floor,
Recalcitrant prides and hesitations:
To pile them carefully in a desperate oblation
And say to you ‘quickly! Turn them
Once over and burn them’.
We may not always see these barriers — his first collection The Walls of Glass (1934) keeps returning to the image of glass blocking our way — but like the scattered tribes after the fall of Babel, communication with our fellow man is stunted before we even speak:
Cut off in my communications; stammering; speaking
A dialect shared by you, but not you and you;
I, strangely undeft, bereft; I searching always
For my lost rib (clothed in laughter yet understanding)
To come round the corner of Wardour Street into the Square
Or to signal across the Park and share my bed;
This is from a poem titled ‘Any Man Speaks’, which uses the first person pronoun — seemingly as Nicholson suggests. The sense of separation — ‘cut off’ by ‘a dialect shared by you, but not you and you’ — is universal; we might all feel that same sense of isolation from those around us while ‘searching always’ to connect. Yet the experience is also very private, moving from the public street and park into the personal space of the bed. The specifics of the location — Wardour Street and Soho Square — and the ‘signal’ to the woman suggest this to be an encounter with a prostitute. Yet it is merely a suggestion: a coded, private ‘signal’ to the reader, only understood if we share the poet’s ‘dialect’ of place names. The poem itself is a ‘divided city’, both public and private; it is the key distinction between everyman and the ‘any man’ of the title. This experience is specific, rather than general.
What we know of Tessimond’s life shares a similar quality to this poem. Working on him, reading the letters he wrote and the letters written to him, it is sometimes striking how few secrets this man had, openly talking about paying for prostitutes to share his bed. We know that he never slept with these women — that for some reason he was not able to — but, as his close friend, Frances Richards records, “he was content just to look at her — something different to himself”. These encounters he described as falling in love, as if, in the poem ‘Any Man Speaks’, the chance encounter with the prostitute might be the meeting with his ‘lost rib’, the union that would make him whole again.
At the same time, there are many things we do not know because he kept them private. Richards wrote of how he “never discussed his childhood or youth […] as if it was blotted out of his life and memory”. It was however a spoken secret; he told his friends that he would not talk about this relationship. Frances Richards again:
I have always wondered what his mother was like, since he disliked her so much. I don’t know what she did to him or did not do, but he told me that the thought of her made him feel sick. He went into no details about that, nor ever mentioned his bank manager father.
It is a tantalising gap in our knowledge, but it is made so by the scrap of detail we are given: “the thought of her made him feel sick”. We know that Tessimond was a late baby — his mother was thirty-nine when he was born — and, though he told friends that he was an only child, the 1901 census records that there was a sister, Lilian C. Tessimond, who was fifteen when John was born.
Richards’ words: “what she did to him or did not do” is a Tessimond-like construction — the possible act or its opposite action achieve the same ends: witness in ‘The Man in the Bowler Hat’ how one might be “patient too long and [obey] too much”; or, in ‘London’: “People who laugh too little and too loudly”. The effect of nothing and the effect of too much of something combine; in Tessimond’s life he might simultaneously appear too private and too public. In his poem ‘The Children look at the Parents’, the children express anger at the parents who:
Shared money but not your secrets;
Will leave as your final legacy
A box double-locked by the spider
Packed with your unsolved problems.
And so it might seem with Tessimond himself — a double-locked box of secrets, but one that seems to invite us to unlock that box, as here in ‘The Lesser Artists’:
We speak to a few of you now, but to many later,
And more still after both you and we have gone,
And we, through you have left our devious traces:
Ciphers in caves or under a marked stone waiting
For a finder one day to decode, and show to his friends.We have dealt too much in ciphers; sat in corners,
Out of the wind, talking in undertones
With private signs, drawing too close together,
Drawing the blind.
It is wrong to think that the secrets of this man’s life might be discovered by cracking some hidden cipher in his writing — that is not what poetry is for, nor should we want it to be — his poetry does not seek to be biographical and it should be right that what he chose to keep hidden should be kept hidden. However, what is clear is the sense of the private and public co-existing — and the things carefully chosen to be made known being a cipher also. In Frances Richards’ memoir she recalls, in her last meeting with the poet, how he began to detail an encounter with a girl to whom he had given all of his money:
Now, I did not want to listen to this — such a repetition of previous conversations — so, I turned it off…
It is not so much the repetition of girls that is striking — as Richards says:
When one says ‘Poor Tessimond’ we have to remember that he thought he was in love every six months and that was a real and true thing for him
— but the ‘repetition of previous conversations’ which catches us by surprise. The act of reporting the encounter makes it real, makes it into a love story — however unbelievable.
It is perhaps for this reason that what scraps we have of Tessimond’s life seem littered with deeply personal information: they are an attempt to give flesh to the self he feared was all too unnoticeable.
A.S.J. Tessimond remains a striking and original voice of twentieth century poetry, a figure both known and loved, and yet wholly unknown. To be unnoticed is not the same thing as to be unnoticeable; yet perhaps, when this excess of artful openness so perfectly counterbalances an excess of artful privacy, the end effect is similar — the state of being unnoticeable proceeding from, produced by, the status of being unnoticed.
—
The Last Augustan enters a brothel…
It is interesting to see how facts become facts. Darwin once said that mistakes in analysis were forgivable – other people could reinterpret the data later – but mistakes of fact were not; they might be perpetuated by anyone who ever came to read them.
I misquote Darwin there to prove my point. You must not go repeating it; it isn’t exactly what he said.
In 1968, Alethea Hayter wrote a really quite wonderful book called Opium and the Romantic Imagination. It is a study of the effects of the drug on various writers and their works and is a compelling and enlightening read. Faber has recently brought it back into print, and I’m glad of that, not least because amongst the poets she addresses is George Crabbe, and it’s the kind of book that might reach a general audience and send people off to discover him for themselves. It offers a way into a lot of writing that people might not usually approach because it’s often hard to get a handle on.
However, something else happens in the book, something that strikes me both as extraordinary, and dangerous, and yet probably more commonplace than we recognise.
In writing about Crabbe’s poem ‘The World of Dreams’, Hayter identifies one particular passage as referring to “some incident in his early days in London when [Crabbe] had been inveigled into a brothel, and had seen a bare-breasted prostitute in a filthy room.”
It’s an exciting detail that. Suddenly the life of this modest Suffolk clergyman, opium addict though he was, takes a turn in a direction we had not anticipated.
What’s perhaps most surprising is that no mention of this incident appears anywhere before Hayter’s book. I think it’s quite probable that the passage from the poem might refer to a dream of a prostitute – and there are various possible reasons for this – but crucially, before 1968 nobody had ever mentioned him seeing a bare-breasted prostitute in a filthy room.
What seems likely is that Hayter, in her extensive work on a great number of writers for the book, is simply confusing him for someone else.
It’s an error. It should be forgiven. It should not detract too much from a book that performs a valuable service.
However, where problems arise is what happens after. People read the book. People assume it to be correct. People write their own books and this mistake becomes repeated; appears to be a fact. One person saying something you have not heard before raises questions; if five people say it, you tend to assume some sort of basis for the thing.
A recent biography of Crabbe makes this error. Repeats it. Builds upon it. Assumes it to be unlikely that Crabbe visited a prostitute in his youth – suddenly the idea is out there that he “[became] entangled with a prostitute” aged sixty-two. Suddenly that is out in the world, and it is based on something someone got wrong for the first time in 1968.
Here is another example.
In a lot of criticism on Crabbe the argument arises over whether or not he was “the last Augustan” or “the last of the Augustans” – whether or not he is the final proponent of the Augustan tradition in poetry. For what it’s worth, I don’t think he is. I like to think of him as “the first Victorian”, but that’s by the by.
What is interesting is the phrase: “the last Augustan” – always in speech marks, always accepted as an accepted view. Where does it come from? Various writers from Thomas E. Kebbel in his Life of George Crabbe (1888) to F.R. Leavis in Revaluation (1936) have made connections between Crabbe’s writing and Augustan poetry, but who first began the debate on whether he was the last of the tradition?
The earliest direct usage appears to be Ian Gregor’s article ‘The last Augustan: some observations on the poetry of Crabbe’ in The Dublin Review (1955). Frank Whitehead in George Crabbe: A Reappraisal (London: Associated University Presses, 1995) suggests this to be the origin of the phrase, however, Walter E. Broman writing in 1953, two years before Gregor’s publication, mentions:
[…]the long-established assumption that Crabbe was a stodgy anachronism or merely “the last of the Augustans.”
‘Factors in Crabbe’s Eminence in the Early Nineteenth Century’ in Modern Philology, Vol. 51, No. 1 (Aug., 1953), p.44.
Despite the quotation marks, where Broman finds this assumption being “long-established” is not cited.
What seems most probable is that the phrase, though useful to the debate, originates in a misreading of something by T.S. Eliot. In the introduction to his edition of Johnson’s London and the Vanity of Human Wishes (Haslewood Books, 1930) Eliot notes of Johnson’s verse:
He has more in common in spirit with Crabbe than with any of his contemporaries; at the same time he is the last Augustan.
I’m not saying it’s a fact, but it appears that this is the first time the words “Crabbe” and “the last Augustan” appear as words on the same page. Even though Eliot by no means was suggesting that Crabbe was such a thing, maybe a misreading of that passage is how “the last Augustan” debate began.
Thus by himself compell’d to live each day,
To wait for certain hours the tide’s delay;
At the same time the same dull views to see,
The bounding marsh-bank and the blighted tree;
The water only, when the tides were high,
When low, the mud half-cover’d and half-dry;
The sun-burnt tar that blisters on the planks,
And bank-side stakes in their uneven ranks;
Heaps of entangled weeds that slowly float,
As the tide rolls by the impeded boat.
When tides were neap, and, in the sultry day,
Through the tall bounding mud-banks made their way,
Which on each side rose swelling, and below
The dark warm flood ran silently and slow;
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
Or sadly listen to the tuneless cry
Of fishing gull or clanging golden-eye;
What time the sea-birds to the marsh would come,
And the loud bittern, from the bull-rush home,
Gave from the salt-ditch side the bellowing boom:
He nursed the feelings these dull scenes produce,
And loved to stop beside the opening sluice,
Where the small stream, confined in narrow bound,
Ran with a dull, unvaried, sadd’ning sound;
Where all, presented to the eye or ear,
Oppress’d the soul with misery, grief, and fear.
George Crabbe – ‘Letter XXII: Peter Grimes’ from The Borough, 171-204.
One only master grasps the whole domain,
And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain:
No more thy glassy brook reflects the day,
But, choked with sedges, works its weedy way.
Along thy glades, a solitary guest,
The hollow-sounding bittern guards its nest;
Amidst thy desert walks the lapwing flies,
And tires their echoes with unvaried cries.
Sunk are thy bowers in shapeless ruin all,
And the long grass o’ertops the mouldering wall;
And trembling, shrinking from the spoiler’s hand,
Far, far away, thy children leave the land.
Oliver Goldsmith – The Deserted Village, 41-50.
But She—who shrinks while meditating Flight
In the wide Way, whose Bounds delude her Sight,
Yet tir’d in her own Mazes still to roam
And cull poor Banquets for the Soul at home,
Would, ere she ventures, ponder on the Way,
Left Dangers yet unthought-of Flight betray;
Left her Icarian Wing, by Wits unplum’d,
Be robb’d of all the Honours she assum’d;
And Dullness swell; a black and dismal Sea
Gaping her Grave; while Censures madden me.George Crabbe, from The Candidate
The mind of a man of Genius is a fertile and pleasant field, pleasant as Elysium, and fertile as Tempe; it enjoys a perpetual Spring. Of that Spring, Originals are the fairest Flowers: Imitations are of two kinds; one of Nature, one of Authors: The first we call Originals, and confine the term Imitation to the second. I shall not enter into the curious enquiry of what it, or is not, strictly speaking, Original, content with what all must allow, that some Compositions are more so than others; and the more they are so, I say, the better. Originals are, and ought to be, great Favourites, for they are great Benefactors; they extend the Republic of Letters, and add a new province to its dominion: Imitators only give us a sort of Duplicates of what we had, possibly much better, before; increasing the mere Drug of books, while all that makes them valuable, Knowledge and Genius, are at a stand. The pen of an Original Writer, like Armida’s wand, out of a barren waste calls a blooming Spring: Out of that blooming Spring an Imitator is a transplanter of Laurels, which sometimes die in a foreign soil.
But suppose an Imitator to be most excellent (and such there are), yet still he but nobly builds on another’s foundation; his Debt is, at least, equal to his Glory; which therefore, on the balance, cannot be very great. On the contrary, an Original, tho’ but indifferent (its Originality being set aside,) yet has something to boast; it is something to say with him in Horace,
Meo Sum Pauper in ære;
And to share ambition with no less than Cæsar, who declared he had rather be the First in a Village, than the Second at Rome.
Still farther: An Imitator shares his crown, if he has one, with the chosen Object of his Imitation; an Original enjoys an undivided applause. An Original may be said to be of vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of Genius; it grows, it is not made: Imitations are often a sort of Manufacture wrought up by those Mechanics, Art, and Labour, out of pre-existent materials not their own.
Again: We read Imitation with somewhat of his languor, who listens to a twice-told tale: Our spirits rouze at an Original; that is a perfect stranger, and all throng to learn what news from a foreign land: And th’ it comes, like an Indian Prince, adorned with feathers only, having little of weight; yet of our attention it will rob the more Solid, if not equally New: Thus every Telescope is lifted at a new-discovered star; it makes a hundred Astronomers in a moment, and denies equal notice to the sun. But if an Original, by being as excellent, as new, adds admiration to surprise, then we are at the Writer’s mercy; on the strong wing of his Imagination, we are snatched from Britain to Italy, from Climate to Climate, from Pleasure to Pleasure; we have no Home, no Thought, of our own; ’till the Magician drops his Pen: And then falling down in ourselves, we awake to flat Realities, lamenting the change, like the Beggar who dreamt himself a Price.
It is with Thoughts, as it is with Words; and with both, as with Men; they may grow old, and die. Words tarnished, by passing thro’ the mouths of the Vulgar, are laid aside as inelegant, and obsolete. So Thoughts, when become too common, should lose their Currency; and we should send new metal to the Mint, that is, new meaning to the Press. The Division of tongues at Babel did not more effectually debar men from making themselves a name (as the Scripture speaks,) than the too great Concurrence, or Union of tongues will do for ever. We may as well grow good by another’s Virtue, or fat by another’s Food, as famous by another’s Thought. The world will pay its Debt of Praise but once; and instead of applauding, explode a second Demand, as a Cheat.
Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition, (Dublin: P. Wilson, 1759), pp 7-10.
“It is strange to think, in an Age so addicted to the Muses, how Pastoral Poetry comes to be never so much as thought upon considering especially, that it has always been accounted the most considerable of the smaller Poems: Virgil and Spencer made use of it as a Prelude to Heroick Poetry. But I fear the Innocency of the Subject makes it so little inviting at present.
There is no sort of Poetry, if well wrought, but gives Delight. And the Pastoral perhaps may boast of this in a peculiar manner. For, as in Painting, so I believe, in Poetry, the Country affords the most entertaining Scenes, and most delightful Prospects.
Gassendus, I remember, tells us, That Perieskius was a great Lover of Musick, especially that of Birds; because their Artless Strains seem to have less of Passion and Violence, but more of a natural Easiness, and therefore do the rather befriend Contemplation. It is after the Same manner that Pastoral gives a sweet and gentle Composure to the Mind; whereas the Epick and Tragick Poem put the Spirits in too great a Ferment by the Vehemence of their Motions.
To see a stately, well built Palace strikes us, indeed, with Admiration, and swells the Soul, as it were, with Notions of Grandeur. But when I view a little Country Dwelling, advantageously situated amidst a beautiful Variety of Fields, Woods, and Rivers; I feel an unspeakable kind of Satisfaction, and cannot forbear wishing that my good Fortune would place me in so sweet a Retirement.
Theocritus, Virgil, and Spencer, are the only writers that seem to have hit upon the true Nature of Pastoral Poems. So that it will be Honour sufficient for me, if I have not altogether failed in my intent.”
Ambrose Philips, Pastorals, (London: H. Hills, 1710), p.2.
A glimpse of pastoral life, a glimpse of any particular quantity – in Crabbe’s artistic terms, a glimpse of any “tale” – encourages a normally functioning, supposedly “properly functioning” mind to build up notions about the essential nature of things, to come away with the belief that something essential has been learned from experience. But in Crabbe’s world, if you’ve seen one tulip, you’ve only seen one tulip. One tale encourages formulation of one set of notions; another tale, another set. Were Crabbe to have written an imitation of Rasselas in accordance with his own late vision, he would have given us only Rasselas experiencing his negative glimpse of pastoral life but also a second hero experiencing an antithetical, positive glimpse of pastoral life; and he would then have allowed both to continue on their separate journeys, each confidently believing he understood Patoral-ness. Each man lives his own, single tale in life; thus he generates his own “essences” and dreams he has found or is now finding stability – until time’s whirligig snaps his head back. In Crabbe, then, we learn to fear not the loss of reason but the reasoning process itself, because it leads a Rasselas (and, behind him, a Johnson) to believe he can understand the Tulip-ness of things. Crabbe’s rewriting of Johnson would, therefore, alter the Johnsonian postulate, substituting: “Of all the uncertainties of our present state, the most dreadful and alarming is the belief we can reason our way out of some uncertainties.”
L.J. Swingle, ‘Late Crabbe in Relation to the Augustans and Romantics: The Temporal Labyrinth of his tales in Verse, 1812’, in ELH, Vol. 42, No. 4 (Winter, 1975), p.591.
“[…] while the subject thus offers itself I will hear briefly of that shame which people are so apt to have for their religious affections. This is so visible that I believe scarcely anybody ventures to discourse on the solemn truth of religion in common conversation, or to mention such terms as heaven and hell, unless to utter an unmeaning curse, or a complaint that blasphemes. If a man appears really struck with the concerns of another world and manifests them by his conduct and conversation, he is generally thought melancholy or mad. I do not say that an ostentation in religious deportment is a disagreeable thing! But because this is a fault, is indifference a merit? Am I to be ashamed of a good cause, tho’ another thing, because another brings disgrace on it? himself by it? who refuses a post of honour chiefly because its last proprietor was a disgrace to it? and is not Christianity an honour? Shame on the man who thinks it is not. The truth is, our hearts are cold. We do not feel the love of God in them and therefore we are both careless and ashamed. We are caught out of countenance by those who are indifferent and kept in awe by fear of being ridiculous.”
Deleted text, MS.42083
from ‘The World of Dreams’
And is thy soul so wrapt in sleep?
Thy senses, thy affections, fled?
No play of fancy thine, to keep
Oblivion from that grave, thy bed?
Then art thou but the breathing dead:
I envy, but I pity too:
The bravest may my terrors dread,
The happiest fain my joys pursue.
Soon as the real World I lose,
Quick Fancy takes her wonted way,
Or Baxter’s sprites my soul abuse –
For how it is I cannot say,
Nor to what powers a passive prey,
I feel such bliss, I fear such pain;
But all is gloom, or all is gay,
Soon as th’ ideal World I gain.
Come, then, I woo thee, sacred Sleep!
Vain troubles of the world, farewell!
Spirits of Ill! your distance keep –
And in your own dominions dwell,
Ye, the sad emigrants from hell!
Watch, dear seraphic beings, round,
And these black Enemies repel;
Safe be my soul, my slumbers sound!
In vain I pray! It is my sin
That thus admits the shadowy throng.
Oh! now they break tumultuous in –
Angels of darkness fierce and strong.
Oh! I am borne of fate along;
My soul, subdued, admits the foe,
Perceives and yet endures the wrong,
Resists, and yet prepares to go.
Where am I now? and what to meet?
Where I have been entrapt before:
The wicked city’s vilest street,–
I know what I must now explore.
The dark-brow’d throng more near and more,
With murderous looks are on me thrust,
And lo! they ope the accursed door,
And I must go – I know I must!
That female fiend! – Why is she there?
Alas! I know her. – Oh, begone!
Why is that tainted bosom bare,
Why fix’d on me that eye of stone?
Why have they left us thus alone?
I saw the deed – why then appear?
Thou art not form’d of blood and bone!
Come not, dread being, come not near!
So! all is quiet, calm, serene;
I walk a noble mansion round –
From room to room, from scene to scene,
I breathless pass, in gloom profound:
No human shape, no mortal sound –
I feel an awe, I own a dread,
And still proceed! – nor stop nor bound –
And all is silent, all is dead.
Now I’m hurried, borne along,
All is business! all alive!
Heavens! how mighty is the throng,
Voices humming like a hive!
Through the swelling crowd I strive,
Bustling forth my way to trace:
Never fated to arrive
At the still-expected place.
George Crabbe, ‘The World of Dreams’ in The Complete Poetical Works, ed. by Norma Dalrymple-Champneys and Arthur Pollard, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1988) III, pp.246-255.
The Pains of Sleep
Ere on my bed my limbs I lay,
It hath not been my use to pray
With moving lips or bended knees;
But silently, by slow degrees,
My spirit I to Love compose,
In humble trust mine eye-lids close,
With reverential resignation,
No wish conceived, no thought exprest,
Only a sense of supplication;
A sense o’er all my soul imprest
That I am weak, yet not unblest,
Since in me, round me, every where
Eternal Strength and Wisdom are.
But yester-night I prayed aloud
In anguish and in agony,
Up-starting from the fiendish crowd
Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me:
A lurid light, a trampling throng,
Sense of intolerable wrong,
And whom I scorned, those only strong!
Thirst of revenge, the powerless will
Still baffled, and yet burning still!
Desire with loathing strangely mixed
On wild or hateful objects fixed.
Fantastic passions! maddening brawl!
And shame and terror over all!
Deeds to be hid which were not hid,
Which all confused I could not know
Whether I suffered, or I did:
For all seemed guilt, remorse or woe,
My own or others still the same
Life-stifling fear, soul-stifling shame.
So two nights passed: the night’s dismay
Saddened and stunned the coming day.
Sleep, the wide blessing, seemed to me
Distemper’s worst calamity.
The third night, when my own loud scream
Had waked me from the fiendish dream,
O’ercome with sufferings strange and wild,
I wept as I had been a child;
And having thus by tears subdued
My anguish to a milder mood,
Such punishments, I said, were due
To natures deepliest stained with sin,—
For aye entempesting anew
The unfathomable hell within,
The horror of their deeds to view,
To know and loathe, yet wish and do!
Such griefs with such men well agree,
But wherefore, wherefore fall on me?
To be beloved is all I need,
And whom I love, I love indeed.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Christabel; Kubla Khan: A Vision; The Pains of Sleep, (London: John Murray, 1816) pp.61-4.
JRWB 