Poem of the Week: Dream-Pedlary by Thomas Lovell Beddoes | hair

Pedestrian dream

I.

If there are dreams for sale.
What will you buy?
Some cost a passing bell.
Some light sigh,
This vibrates from the new crown of life
Just a rose leaf down.
If there were dreams for sale
Beautiful and sad words,
The caller rang the bell
What will you buy?

secondly.

Lonely hut and still,
With the trellis nearby,
Vague, my troubles still,
Until I die.
This pearl is from the fresh crown of life
Where would I like to be shaken?
If dreams were in the will,
This would heal my illness better,
This I will buy.

Third.

But there were dreams for sale
Did you buy;
They say life is a dream
To wake up, to die.
Dream dream of a prize,
He wishes the ghosts would rise;
And if I had a spell
To summon the buried well
Which one would?

Fourth.

If there are ghosts to raise,
What will I call?
From the dark mists of hell,
Blue sky?
Raise my long lost beloved boy
To lead me to His joy. –
There are no ghosts to raise;
There are no ways out of death;
In vain is the call.

against

Don’t you know you can’t file a lawsuit against ghosts?
You have no love.
Otherwise I will lie as I will
And take your last breath.
Until he emerges from the new crown of life
Falling like a rose petal down.
This is how ghosts should be courted.
This is how all dreams come true
From ever to last!

The Dream-Pedlary by the Bristol-born English poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes, 1803-1849, is his most collected, and arguably his most perfect, lyric. It has music that immediately lifts it off the page, and although it questions the expected regularity of division, scheme, rhyme and form, this slight instability actually contributes to its effectiveness.

For example, the first line has different rhythmic possibilities: it works well if scanned as two-fingered (“if There was dreams For sale”), but it also fits the bill as iambic meter (“if there He was dreams to He sells“), or perhaps more attractively, a combination:”if There was dreams to He sells“Awareness of this flexibility informs the reading of subsequent first lines – for example, the first line of the second stanza, which is most effective with the slower movement of the three iambs: “A cOutage Lonely and Still“.

There is another shift, as the poem seems to begin as a personal, somewhat whimsical question to the reader (“If there were dreams for sale / What would you buy?”: this suggestion of intimacy certainly helps to draw us in. But in the second stanza, the speaker answers his own question, and we begin to sense the inner shifting of his thoughts, which continues until the final stanza, where the speaker’s “you” and “I” separate again, or so it seems.

In terms of rhyme scheme and stanza form, the first stanza is characterized by 10 lines, with the first and second lines repeated unchanged, and a small group of triads that pick up the rhyme A: ‘sell / tell / bell’. This tripartite pattern was dropped in the later nine-line stanzas. However, repetition remains important: it is heard throughout, in the triple-repeated “crown/bottom” rhymes, for example, and the larger question-and-answer pattern.

The argument begins to take hold: there were “dreams for sale,” but the speaker says to himself in the third stanza: “I bought.” The most pressing question concerns the issue of “raising ghosts” – an issue that stems from Beddoes’ practice in both poetry and medicine. His fascination with the Gothic in poems and dramatic writing, The Death Joke in particular, comes from his medical studies, and serious investigation into spiritual survival after death. His conclusion that there is no evidence does not preclude a poetic argument with mortality.

Beddoes’ search for “a prize-worthy dream” centers around the question of the ghost who will “raise it.” He refers to those as “well buried,” a circumstance that suggests there may be a psychological depth desirable for effective burial. New rumors have emerged: If “life is a dream,” then death might be like waking up to a different level of reality.

The ghost he dreamed of in the fourth stanza, “The Long-Lost Beloved Boy”, is believed to be a Russian medical student, Benjamin Bernhard Reich, with whom Beddoes lived for a year while he himself was studying medicine in Göttingen. The complexity of the poet’s sense of alienation took on a new dimension from the growing recognition of his homosexuality. It was an integral part of the spectrum of his creative, political and lifestyle rebellion. In mainland Europe, he was mostly a wanderer, homeless. In the poem, the earlier dream of a stable abode that would “cure my illness better” has a special pathos.

Skillfully negotiating artistic and imaginative integration, Dream-Pedlary shows that Beddoes found his place as a kind of late Romantic poet: see also his early homage to Shelley. At the same time, there is an ironic, almost camp self-consciousness at work: Romantic tropes generate ironic questions, and subtle metaphors take on physical weight. The dream of the first stanza (lines five and six), which only costs a “light sigh” instead of a funeral bell, is revised in the fifth stanza, where the “rose-leaf” and the “fresh crown of life” appear again, in a differently balanced form. The rose petal falls less lightly: the greater certainty of the “crown” is the reality of death, and optimistic inferences can only be contradictory, perhaps offered in pure jest: “Thus ghosts court; / And thus all dreams come true, / For ever!”