Barlow’s typescript, with HPL’s revisions in pen, survives, so that the exact degree of the latter’s authorship can be ascertained (see the article by Joshi, in which the text is reproduced with HPL’s words placed in brackets). HPL has made no significant structural changes, merely making cosmetic changes in style and diction; but he has written the bulk of the concluding section, especially the purportedly cosmic reflections when the last man on earth finally meets his ironic death. The title is from Robert Burns’s “A Red, Red Rose” (1796): “Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear….” See S.T.Joshi, “Lovecraft’s Contribution to ‘Till A’ the Seas,’” CryptNo. 17 (Hallowmas 1983): 33–39. Tillinghast, Crawford.
In “From Beyond,” the mad scientist who invents a machine that reveals creatures and worlds perceptible to the five senses. He dies, ostensibly of “apoplexy,” after demonstrating his machine to his unnamed colleague. (In HPL’s original draft of the story, the character was named Henry Annesley.)
Tillinghast, Dutee.
In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,a ship-captain who is in the employ of Joseph Curwen in eighteenth-century Providence. Evidently under some terrible compulsion, he is forced to permit Curwen to marry his only daughter, Eliza, so that Curwen can repair his reputation in Providence society. Eliza and Curwen have a daughter, Ann. After Curwen’s apparent death, Eliza resumes her maiden name; Ann Tillinghast later marries Welcome Potter, Charles Dexter Ward’s great-greatgrandfather.
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Tilton, Anna.
In “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” the curator of the Newburyport Historical Society who shows Robert Olmstead the strange marine-motif jewelry associated with Innsmouth, which he later recognizes among jewelry that belonged to his great-grandmother.
T’la-yub.
In “The Mound,” a noblewoman in Panfilo de Zamacona’s “affection-group” who attempts to escape the underworld realm with Zamacona but fails hideously: captured by the mound denizens, she is tortured in the amphitheatre and becomes a half-dematerialized corpse-slave who is stationed as a guard at the entrance of the mound. It is her occasional appearance aboveground that leads to rumors of a ghost haunting the mound.
“To a Dreamer.”
Poem (24 lines in quatrains); written on April 25, 1920. First published in the Coyote(January 1921); rpt. WT(November 1924).
The narrator scans the features of a nameless dreamer and wonders where his “dream-steps” have led him. The poem contains the first mentions of such terms (used later in HPL’s stories) as the “peaks of Thok” and the “vaults of Zin”; the “vale of Pnath” is also mentioned, although Pnath had first been coined in “The Doom That Came to Sarnath” (1919). HPL notes in a letter to Frank Belknap Long (June 4, 1921; AHT) that the poem was founded on an idea occurring among Baudelaire’s notes and jottings (presumably from Baudelaire: His Prose and Poetry,ed. T.R.Smith [Modern Library, 1919], which HPL owned and which was the source of the epigraph in “Hypnos”). “To a Sophisticated Young Gentleman, Presented by His Grandfather with a Volume of Contemporary Literature.”
Poem (82 lines); written on December 15, 1928. First published in SL2.255–57.
The poem was written to accompany a copy of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way,which HPL presented to Frank Belknap Long for Christmas. In the course of the poem HPL delivers telling blows on the freakishness and extravagance of much modern literature and the culture that produced it. In the first published appearance (a letter to James F.Morton, [January 1929]), the poem bears a variant title: “An Epistle to Francis, Ld. Belknap….”
“To Charlie of the Comics.”
Poem (32 lines in 4 stanzas); probably written in late September 1915. First published in the Providence Amateur(February 1916).
A poem on Charlie Chaplin. It was written in response to Rheinhart Kleiner’s poem “To Mary of the Movies” ( Piper,September 1915), about Mary Pickford. HPL professed enjoyment of Chaplin’s films, many of which he saw (see SL1.18, 50–51). For another poem on films, see the satire “To Mistress Sophia Simple, Queen of the Cinema” (written August 1917; first published in the United Amateur, November 1919), a reply to Kleiner’s “To a Movie Star,” published in the same issue of the United Amateur
“To Clark Ashton Smith, Esq., upon His Phantastick Tales, Verses, Pictures, and Sculptures.”
Poem (sonnet); written in December 1936. First published in WT(April 1938) (as “To Clark Ashton Smith”).
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A tribute to HPL’s longtime colleague, the poem bears at least one variant title (“To Klarkash-Ton, Lord of Averoigne”) alluding to the fictitious region in medieval France invented by Smith in some of his tales. In “The Whisperer in Darkness” and other tales, HPL alludes to Smith (as he does repeatedly in his letters to him) as Klarkash-Ton.
“To Mr. Finlay, upon His Drawing for Mr. Bloch’s Tale, ‘The Faceless God.’” Poem (sonnet); written on November 30, 1936. First published in the Phantagraph(May 1937); rpt. WT(July 1937).
HPL composed the poem while writing a letter to Finlay, who had lamented the decline of the tradition of dedicatory poems. “The Faceless God” had appeared in WT(May 1936), and Finlay’s illustration is generally considered the finest ever published in the magazine.
“To Zara.”
Poem (42 lines); written on August 31, 1922. First published in SL1.164–65 (in a letter to Maurice W.Moe, [September] 1922).
The poem is a hoax: it is purportedly written by Poe (in one ms. HPL dates it to 1829) and is an imitation/parody of Poe’s numerous and extravagant poems to women (this one is dedicated to “Miss Sarah Longhurst”). HPL wrote it as a joke on Alfred Galpin, who generally regarded HPL’s poetry with disdain. HPL and Frank Belknap Long claimed that they had found the poem in the possession of an ancient Maine man who had known Poe. Galpin, although not believing this story, thought the poem was copied from the work of some obscure nineteenth-century poet, perhaps Arthur O’Shaughnessy. Tobey, William.
In “The Lurking Fear,” he and George Bennett accompany the narrator to the Martense mansion in search of the entity that haunts it. They spend the night, but Tobey and Bennett mysteriously disappear.
Toldridge, Elizabeth [Anne] (1861–1940),
poet and correspondent of HPL (1928–37). Toldridge published two collections of verse, The Soul of Love(New York: Broadway Publishing Co., 1910) and Mother’s Love Songs(Boston: R.G. Badger, 1911), long before she ever came in touch with HPL. She was also widely published in amateur and semi-professional magazines and anthologies. She got in touch with HPL in 1928, some years after HPL had served as a judge for a poetry contest (otherwise unknown) in which Toldridge had participated. She was disabled in some unknown manner and was unable to leave her apartment in Washington, D.C. HPL visited her there on May 6, 1929; in 1936 R.H. Barlow visited her while traveling from Florida to Providence. Her discussions of poetry with HPL may have been instrumental in HPL’s shift away from archaistic verse in theory and practice.