The City Of Dreadful Night
This started off with a search for the poetry of W.B.Yeats and, through the magic of site-skipping, ended up somewhere else entirely, but first a small digression:
Somebody - I can't remember who now - asked me fairly recently why I don't write poetry and I don't think I answered the question at the time so I'll do it now, and the answer is 'I don't write poetry because I suck at it'. In my mid to late teens I turned out reams of the stuff, all heavily indebted to Dylan Thomas and each one individually the literary equivalent of a steaming cow turd. Unfortunately having the technical knowledge necessary to construct poetry is no guarantee that the final result is going to be any good, and that same knowledge robs you of the ability to deceive yourself about its merits. For a while I embraced free verse as my saviour until it dawned on me that the lack of a formal structure actually makes it harder to produce anything worthwhile. So I gave up, and I remain given up.
Anyway, getting back to the true subject of this post, I'm not sure exactly how I ended up with James Thomson's 'The City Of Dreadful Night' but it was like meeting an old friend after an absence of many years. Thomson was the author of 'Sunday Up The River', a technically accomplished but, in my opinion, rather limp specimen of the kind of sentimental verse that Victorian parents doted on and considered sufficiently undisturbing and morally improving to be part of the literary diet of their children, and to which I was subjected at junior school (it could be that I'm being unfair in this assessment, which is based on memory of an abridged version of the piece. I haven't read the whole thing and I'm not sure that I will).
Somewhat later - in fact during the period when I was producing my sub-Thomas crap - I came upon an extract from 'The City Of Dreadful Night' in a poetry anthology, which started with this stanza:
Now for someone whose imaginative life was already warped by weird fiction and surrealism this was heady stuff but it took me years to track down the full poem, and I wasn't disappointed when I did. The poem is a tour de force: a lengthy meditation on madness and despair, on a life spent locked in the benighted city of the melancholy mind.
The poem is too long - truly epic in fact - to post, but you can find it here.
Enjoy it (if you can!).
Somebody - I can't remember who now - asked me fairly recently why I don't write poetry and I don't think I answered the question at the time so I'll do it now, and the answer is 'I don't write poetry because I suck at it'. In my mid to late teens I turned out reams of the stuff, all heavily indebted to Dylan Thomas and each one individually the literary equivalent of a steaming cow turd. Unfortunately having the technical knowledge necessary to construct poetry is no guarantee that the final result is going to be any good, and that same knowledge robs you of the ability to deceive yourself about its merits. For a while I embraced free verse as my saviour until it dawned on me that the lack of a formal structure actually makes it harder to produce anything worthwhile. So I gave up, and I remain given up.
Anyway, getting back to the true subject of this post, I'm not sure exactly how I ended up with James Thomson's 'The City Of Dreadful Night' but it was like meeting an old friend after an absence of many years. Thomson was the author of 'Sunday Up The River', a technically accomplished but, in my opinion, rather limp specimen of the kind of sentimental verse that Victorian parents doted on and considered sufficiently undisturbing and morally improving to be part of the literary diet of their children, and to which I was subjected at junior school (it could be that I'm being unfair in this assessment, which is based on memory of an abridged version of the piece. I haven't read the whole thing and I'm not sure that I will).
Somewhat later - in fact during the period when I was producing my sub-Thomas crap - I came upon an extract from 'The City Of Dreadful Night' in a poetry anthology, which started with this stanza:
As I came through the desert thus it was,
As I came through the desert: All was black,
In heaven no single star, on earth no track;
A brooding hush without a stir or note,
The air so thick it clotted in my throat;
And thus for hours; then some enormous things
Swooped past with savage cries and clanking wings:
But I strode on austere;
No hope could have no fear.
Now for someone whose imaginative life was already warped by weird fiction and surrealism this was heady stuff but it took me years to track down the full poem, and I wasn't disappointed when I did. The poem is a tour de force: a lengthy meditation on madness and despair, on a life spent locked in the benighted city of the melancholy mind.
The poem is too long - truly epic in fact - to post, but you can find it here.
Enjoy it (if you can!).
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