Victorian Poetry

Poetry in the late nineteenth century

Dreadful Night" as a phantasm, there can be no doubt that it is meant to

express a deep truth that, as Fletcher says, "promises no transcendence"

because "the alienation of the speaker is final" (xix).

Yet we need to understand that, powerful though Thomson's poem is, it

can hardly be taken as in any sense a realistic study. In his 1910 monograph

on Thomson, Betram Dobell remarks:

Thomson does not often attempt the dramatic presentation of the world

outside: he prefers rather to study the workings of his own mind than to

observe the evolutions of the great drama of humanity. His own thoughts and

emotions were almost exclusively the subjects of his writings. Perhaps his

works, while gaining in intensity from this cause, lost something in breadth of

sympathy and in sanity of outlook upon life. 41

The last sentence may nod toward the then current orthodoxy about the
bonds that tie genius to insanity, but it inevitably owes something to
Dobell's unstated awareness of Thomson's life of drug dependency, leading
to the belief that his death from alcoholic poisoning was in fact suicide.
John Stokes has written instructively of suicide in the 1890s, and although
Stokes does not mention him, Thomson can surely be regarded as a
forerunner of the Decadent hero, one "exceptionally sensitive to the world
around him." 42 Stokes quotes Arthur Symons's remarks on how Dowson
possessed a "swift, disastrous and suicidal energy of genius." 43 Stokes also
notes how Holbrook Jackson, in his influential The Eighteen Nineties
(1913), marveled at the many characteristic figures of the 1890s - Aubrey
Beardsley, Dowson, and Lionel Johnson, among others - who died young.
Other poets had already died: the "fleshly" Rossetti in 1882, the free-
thinking Thomson also in 1882, and the Anglo-Jewish feminist Amy Levy
in 1889. All of these writers can be thought of as caught up and perhaps
trapped by that developing belief in the artist as wounded by his or her art
so that artistic utterance was the display of temperament. Levy's poetry is a
good example of this "wounded" temperament. Her London, however,
appears not as a city of dreadful night but one of dreadful day. Here, for
example, is the opening stanza of "London Poets":

They trod the streets and squares where now I tread,

With weary hearts, a little while ago;

When, thin and grey, the melancholy snow

Clung to the leafless branches overhead;

Or when the smoke-veiled sky grew stormy-red

In autumn; with a re-arisen woe

Wrestled, what time the passionate spring winds blow. (AL 389 )

In these lines, there is no Romantic consolation of the seasons - no hope,

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