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The City of Dreadful Night begins with two Italian epigraphs, one by Dante, one by Leopardi. The Dante says, “Per me si va nella citta dolente” (“Through me you enter into the sorrowful city.”) But this is not the all too familiar motto over the Gate of Hell. Rather, from Thomson’s poem, we realize this is Thomson’s motto for the gate of birth and that the city of life itself is, for Thomson, the sorrowful city, the city without hope or love or faith. And Leopardi is, after all, the poet who wrote to his sister Paolina about the grandeur that was Rome: “These huge buildings and interminable streets are just so many spaces thrown between men, instead of being spaces that contain men.” The City of Dreadful Night is a blunt and powerful, if not the most artful, presentation of the condition of humanity bereft of all the consolations of Christianity as well as the community of small rural settlements — next to which The Waste Land, with its incursions of medieval myth, occultism, and Eastern religions to provide a possible code of meaning and conduct, looks positively optimistic!

Back in his twenty-second year, however, in 1857, while still stationed at Ballincollig, Thomson wrote what, today, we must read as a “dry run” for the more famous series (that he would go on to write between ’71 and ’73, with trips to both the U.S.A. and Spain coming to interrupt its composition). Called The Doom of a City, its four parts (“The Voyage,” “The City,” “The Judgment,” and “The Return”) run to some 43 pages in my edition — fifteen pages longer than the 28-page City of Dreadful Night. Although Plato’s mythic island is never mentioned by name, clearly this is the young Thomson’s attempt to tell his own version of the story of Atlantis. (Again, the basic idea may have come from his idoclass="underline" on a shipboard journey in Chapter III of Novalis’s Ofterdingen, merchants regale Heinrich and his mother with a tale of Atlantis, in which Atlantis’s king is enamored of poetry and his daughter, who rides off and meets a young scholar in the woods, loses a ruby from her necklace which the young man finds, returns for it the next day, stays to fall in love, retreats to a cave with the young man in a storm, and lives with him and his father for a year before returning to court with her child and the lute-playing young man, for a glorious reunion with the king — a fairy tale whose overwhelming affect is its reliance on time’s ability to absorb all intergenerational, or generally Oedipal, tensions, so that the reference to its destruction in the closing line, “Nur in Sagen heisst es, dass Atlantis von machtigen Fluten den Augen entzogen worden sie,” [“Only in legends are we told that mighty floods took Atlantis from the sight of man”], falls like a veil between us and a vision of paradise.) In Part I, “The Voyage,” of Doom of a City, the despairing poet rises in the middle of the night and takes a skiff that, leaving his own city, brings him over the lightless water — after a brief, but harmless, confrontation with a sea monster — to dawn and the shore of a great and mysterious City. The day, however, grows stormy.

After waiting out the day on shore, here is the City the poet finally finds at sunset:

… Dead or dumb,
That mighty City through the breathless air
Thrilled forth no pulse of sound, no faintest hum
Of congregated life in street and square:
Becalmed beyond all calm those galleons lay,
As still and lifeless as their shadows there,
Fixed in the magic mirror of the bay
As in a rose-flushed crystal weirdly fair.
A strange, sad dream: and like a fiery ball,
Blazoned with death, that sky hung over all.
Night descends; and the poet enters the darkened City’s gates:
The moon hung golden, large and round,
Soothing its beauty up the quiet sky
In swanlike slow pulsations, while I wound
Through dewy meads and gardens of rich flowers,
Whose fragrance like a subtle harmony
Was fascination to the languid hours.

In the moonlight, he finds a garden of cypress, a funeral come to a halt, and a market. But all the inhabitants are frozen stone instead of living people. He moves on into the City:

My limbs were shuddering while my veins ran fire,
And hounded on by dread
No less than by desire,
I plunged into the City of the Dead,
And pierced its mausolean loneliness
Between the self-sufficing palaces,
Broad fronts of azure, fire and gold, which shone
Spectrally valid in the moonlight wan,
Adown great streets; through spacious sylvan squares,
Whose fountains plashing lone
Fretted the silence with perpetual moan;
Past range on range of marts which spread their wares
Weirdly unlighted to the eye of heaven,
Jewels and silks and golden ornaments,
Rich perfumes, soul-in-soul of all rare scents.
Viols and timbrels: O wild mockery!
Where are the living shrines for these adornings?
The poet explores on, but instead of a populace in the City —
What found I? Dead stone sentries stony-eyed,
Erect, steel-sworded, brass-defended all,
Guarding the sombrous gateway deep and wide
Hewn like a cavern through the mighty wall;
Stone statues all throughout the streets and squares.
Grouped as in social converse or alone;
Dim stony merchants holding forth rich wares
To catch the choice of purchasers in stone;
Fair statues leaning over balconies,
Whose bosoms made the bronze and marble chill;
Statues about the lawns, beneath the trees
Firm sculptured horsemen on stone horses still;
Statues fixed gazing on the flowing river
Over the bridge’s sculpted parapet;
Statues in boats, amidst its sway and quiver
Immovable as if in ice-waves set: —
The whole vast sea of life about me lay,
The passionate, the heaving, restless, sounding life,
With all its side and billows, foam and spray,
Attested in full tumult of its strife
Frozen into a nightmare’s ghastly death,
Struck silent by its laughter and its moan.
The vigorous heart and brain and blood and breath
Stark, strangled, confined in eternal stone.

The poet continues to regard the urban landscape around him with its stony populace —

Look away there to the right — How the bay lies broad and bright,
All athrob with murmurous rapture in the glory of the moon!
See in front the palace stand, halls and columns nobly planned;
Marble home for marble dwellers is it not full fair and boon?
See the myriads gathered there on that green and wooded square,
In mysterious congregation, — they are statues every one:
All are clothed in rich array; it is some high festal day;
The solemnity is perfect with the pallid moon for sun.

As he finally sees the stony autarch of the city (beside whom crouches the skeleton of Death), the whole, frozen vision, with all its populace turned to stone, lit with a full moon, a series of towering gods appear (Part III, “The Judgment”), and a booming Voice proceeds to judge wanting one aspect of the City after another; and, on each judgment, that section of the City falls into the sea, or is toppled by an earthquake, to be swallowed up.