“Among the coral crypts that hold the sea / Festoons of fishes weave insanity.”

Whoops, forgot (holiday) to post for Poetry Monday on Monday, making this a posthumous post appropriate for one more posthumous poem by a 2nd Gen Romantic, though one who wasn’t one of the three greats:

“Dirge,” Thomas Beddoes

If thou wilt ease thine heart
Of love, and all its smart,—
            Then sleep, dear, sleep!
And not a sorrow
      Hang any tear on your eyelashes;
            Lie still and deep,
      Sad soul, until the sea-wave washes
The rim o’ the sun to-morrow,
            In eastern sky.

But wilt thou cure thine heart
Of love, and all its smart,—
            Then die, dear, die!
’Tis deeper, sweeter,
      Than on a rose bank to lie dreaming
            With folded eye;
      And then alone, amid the beaming
Of love’s stars, thou’lt meet her
            In eastern sky.


A funeral song from the start of Act II, scene 1, of Death’s Jest-Book; or The Fool’s Tragedy, another long work with a ridiculous provisional title, though in this case it was completed but eternally tinkered with for a few decades rather than unfinished due to terminal illness. Beddoes was, like Keats, a medical-type turned poet-and-would-be-dramatist, though he’d been a physician rather than surgeon and outlived his 20s. And yes, Britten did set this to music, as have many others.

---L.

Subject quote from Festoons of Fishes, Alfred Kreymborg, which I’ve been waiting for ages to use.