James Thomson
James Thomson, who wrote under the pseudonym Bysshe Vanolis, was a Victorian-era poet famous primarily for the long poem The City of Dreadful Night (1874), an expression of bleak pessimism in a dehumanized, uncaring urban environment. He is often distinguished from the earlier Scottish poet James Thomson by the letters B.V. after his name.
Thomson was born in Port Glasgow, Scotland, and, after his father suffered a stroke, raised in an orphanage. He received his education at the Caledonian Asylum and the Royal Military Academy and served in Ireland, where in 1851, at the age of 17, he made the acquaintance of the 18-year-old Charles Bradlaugh who was already notorious as a freethinker, having published his first atheist pamphlet a year earlier.
More than a decade later, Thomson left the military and moved to London, where he worked as a clerk. He remained in contact with Bradlaugh, who was by now issuing his own weekly National Reformer, a "publication for the working man". For the remaining 19 years of his life, starting in 1863, Thomson submitted stories, essays and poems to various publications, including the National Reformer, which published the sombre poem which remains his most famous work.
The City of Dreadful Night came about from the struggle with insomnia, alcoholism and chronic depression which plagued Thomson's final decade. Increasingly isolated from friends and society in general, he even became hostile towards Bradlaugh. In 1880, nineteen months before his death, the publication of his volume of poetry, The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems elicited encouraging and complimentary reviews from a number of critics, but came too late to prevent Thomson's downward slide.
Thomson's remaining poems rarely appear in modern anthologies, although the autobiographical Insomnia and Mater Tenebrarum are well-regarded and contain some striking passages. He admired and translated the works of the pessimistic Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798 - 1837), but his own lack of hope was darker than that of Leopardi. He is considered by some students of the Victorian age as the bleakest of that era's poets. He died in London at the age of 47.
“Rule, Britannia! rule the waves:Britons never will be slaves.”
“Your woe hath been my anguish; yea, I quailAnd perish in your perishing unblest.And I have searched the highths and depths, the scopeOf all our universe, with desperate hopeTo find some solace for your wild unrest.”
“Who is most wretched in this dolorous place?I think myself; yet I would rather beMy miserable self than He, than HeWho formed such creatures to His own disgrace.The vilest thing must be less vile than ThouFrom whom it had its being, God and Lord!Creator of all woe and sin! abhorredMalignant and implacable! I vowThat not for all Thy power furled and unfurled,For all the temples to Thy glory built,Would I assume the ignominious guiltOf having made such men in such a world.As if a Being, God or Fiend, could reign,At once so wicked, foolish and insane,As to produce men when He might refrain!The world rolls round for ever like a mill;It grinds out death and life and good and ill;It has no purpose, heart or mind or will.While air of Space and Time's full river flowThe mill must blindly whirl unresting so:It may be wearing out, but who can know?Man might know one thing were his sight less dim;That it whirls not to suit his petty whim,That it is quite indifferent to him.Nay, does it treat him harshly as he saith?It grinds him some slow years of bitter breath,Then grinds him back into eternal death.”
“How the moon triumphs through the endless nights!How the stars throb and glitter as they wheelTheir thick processions of supernal lightsAround the blue vault obdurate as steel!And men regard with passionate awe and yearningThe mighty marching and the golden burning,And think the heavens respond to what they feel.Boats gliding like dark shadows of a dreamAre glorified from vision as they passThe quivering moonbridge on the deep black stream;Cold windows kindle their dead glooms of glassTo restless crystals; cornice dome and columnEmerge from chaos in the splendour solemn;Like faery lakes gleam lawns of dewy grass.With such a living light these dead eyes shine,These eyes of sightless heaven, that as we gazeWe read a pity, tremulous, divine,Or cold majestic scorn in their pure rays:Fond man! they are not haughty, are not tender;There is no heart or mind in all their splendour,They thread mere puppets all their marvellous maze.”
“And now at last authentic word I bring,Witnessed by every dead and living thing;Good tidings of great joy for you, for all:There is no God; no Fiend with names divineMade us and tortures us; if we must pine,It is to satiate no Being's gall.It was the dark delusion of a dream,That living Person conscious and supreme,Whom we must curse for cursing us with life;Whom we must curse because the life he gaveCould not be buried in the quiet grave,Could not be killed by poison or the knife.This little life is all we must endure,The grave's most holy peace is ever sure,We fall asleep and never wake again;Nothing is of us but the mouldering flesh,Whose elements dissolve and merge afreshIn earth, air, water, plants, and other men.We finish thus; and all our wretched raceShall finish with its cycle, and give placeTo other beings with their own time-doom:Infinite aeons ere our kind began;Infinite aeons after the last manHas joined the mammoth in earth's tomb and womb.”
“For life is but a dream whose shapes return, some frequently, some seldom, some by night and some by day.”
“Our Mother feedeth thus our little life, That we may in turn feed her with our death”
“Once in a stately passion I cried with desperate grief'Oh Lord, my heart is black with guile, of sinners I am chief'Then stooped my guardian angel and whispered from behind 'Vanity my little man, you're nothing of the kind' ”