Many poets and readers over the years have felt themselves a “brother” to Thomson; and The City of Dreadful Night retains a certain extra-canonical fascination to this day. Much of Thomson’s poem (The “Proem” and sections 1, 3, 7, 9, 11, 13, 17, 19, and 21) falls, ironically enough, into the seven-line rhyme scheme of the usually light and happy French rondolet — though without the line-length variations (i.e., the traditionally defective first, third, and seventh lines) ordinarily found in that form: rather, for his purposes, Thomson used the more stately iambic pentameter for his moody monody. Thomson’s series has been popular with poets, eccentrics, and night lovers since its first publication over two issues of the National Reformer in 1874. George Meredith and George Eliot were among its earliest enthusiasts. But there is a good deal more shared between the two poetic series than simply the title of their opening sections. Both The Bridge and The City of Dreadful Night are largely urban poems, yet both have powerful extra-urban moments. As well, the variation in tone among The Bridge’s fifteen separate sections is very close to the sort of variation we find among the 21 sections of Thomson’s nocturnal meditation on hopelessness and isolation.
Indeed, it’s arguable that — granted the dialogue between them we’ve already mentioned — one purpose behind both The Waste Land and The Bridge was to write a poem, or poem series, of the sort for which Thomson’s City of Dreadful Night was the prototype; if, indeed, that was among the generating complexities of both poems, then certainly, on that front, Crane’s is the more successful.
Today, Thomson experts will sometimes talk of his poems “In the Room,” “Insomnia,” “Sunday at Hampstead,” and even his narrative “Waddah and Om-El-Bonain.” But to the vast majority of readers of English poetry, Thomson is (he is even so styled in several card catalogues, to distinguish him from his 18th Century ancestor of the same name, author of The Seasons [mentioned already] and The Castle of Indolence) the “author of The City of Dreadful Night.”
James Thomson was born at Port Glasgow in Renfrewshire, a day or two more than a month before Christmas in 1834. His mother was a deeply, almost fanatically religious Irvingite. During a week of dreadful storms, his father, chief officer aboard the Eliza Stewart, suffered a paralytic stroke and was returned to his family an invalid, immobile on his right side, as well as mentally unsound — when James was six. Two years later, James’s mother enrolled her eight-year-old son in a boarding school, the Caladonian Asylum — and died a month or so later. His father was far too ill to take care of his sons. (James had, by now, a two-year-old brother and had already lost a two-year-old sister a couple of years before.) So James began the life of a scholarship/charity student at one or another boarding school or military academy over the next handful of years.
An extremely bright young man, by seventeen James was virtually a schoolmaster himself at the Chelsea Military Academy. His nickname from the Barnes family with whom he now lived was “Co”—for “precocious.” At sixteen he’d begun to read Shelley and, shortly after, the early German romantic, Novalis. Soon he was publishing poems regularly in London under the pseudonym “Bysshe Vanolis” (or, more usually, under the initial’s “B.V.”). Bysshe was, of course, Shelley’s middle name — and the name he was called by his friends. “Vanolis” was an anagram of Thomson’s new Germanic enthusiasm.
At eighteen Thomson became officially an assistant army schoolmaster — that is, a uniformed soldier who taught the children associated with Camp Curragh in the mornings and the younger soldiers themselves in the afternoon.
Novalis — the Latin term for a newly plowed field — was the penname of Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), remembered for a mystical novel about a poet’s pursuit of a “blue flower” first seen in a dream, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and an intriguing set of notes and fragments, among them the famous “Monologue,” and the even more famous pronouncement, “Character is Fate”—as well, of course, as such wonderful observations as (in Carlyle’s fine translations from his 1829 essay of the young German poet):
To become properly acquainted with a truth we must first have disbelieved it, and disputed against it…
Philosophy is properly Home-sickness; the wish to be everywhere at home…
The division of Philosopher and Poet is only apparent, and to the disadvantage of both. It is a sign of disease, and of a sickly constitution…
There is but one Temple in the World; and that is the Body of Man. Nothing is holier than this high form. Bending before men is a reverence done to this Revelation in the Flesh. We touch Heaven, when we lay our hand on a human body…
We are near awakening when we dream that we dream…
— and the disturbingly prescient observation quoted by Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle, “Writings are the thoughts of the State; archives are its memory.”
As well, Novalis wrote a series of poems, Hymnen an die Nacht (Hymns to the Night), that forms one of the most influential series of poems from the exciting ferment of Early German Romanticism.
Trained as an engineer, the twenty-three-year-old von Hardenberg was working as an assayer in the salt mines where his father had worked before him. In the small Saxon mining town, he met and fell in love with a thirteen-year-old girl, Sophie von Kühn. He sued her family for her hand, and was finally accepted — though the marriage was not to take place until she was older. Hardenberg was devoted to his young fiancée. Two and a half years later, on March 17th of 1797, Sophie turned fifteen. But two days later, on the 19th, after two operations on her liver, she died. Not a full month later, on April 14th, Hardenberg’s younger brother Erasmus passed away. Now Hardenberg wrote a friend in a letter:
It has grown Evening around me, while I was looking into the red of Morning. My grief is boundless as my love. For three years she has been my hourly thought. She alone bound me to life, to the country, to my occupation. With her I am parted from all; for now I scarcely have myself any more. But it has grown Evening…
And in another letter, from May 3rd:
Yesterday I was twenty-five years old. I was in Grünigen and stood beside her grave. It is a friendly spot; enclosed with simple white railing; lies apart, and high. There is still room in it. The village, with its blooming gardens, leans up around the hill; and it is at this point that the eye loses itself in blue distances. I know you would have liked to stand by me, and stick the flowers, my birthday gifts, one by one into her hillock. This time two years, she made me a gay present, with a flag and national cockade on it. To-day her parents gave me the little things which she, still joyfully, had received on her last birthday. Friend, — it continues Evening, and will soon be Night.