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The City of Dreadful Night: And Other Poems by Thomas Bird 1852-1923 Mosher, James 1834-1882 Thomson
bhaines's review against another edition
No. 1 gloomiest guy. Enjoy a fake city, good images in the title poem.
Each bit asks/answers a question. What's it like, who lives here, why might there be light, why might people gather. Memorable bits waking from daydreams to this real night, the lit mansion, the looping tour guide.
Some others surprisingly funny. Liked the good old rule and day.
My crocodiles are happy in my slime.
Each bit asks/answers a question. What's it like, who lives here, why might there be light, why might people gather. Memorable bits waking from daydreams to this real night, the lit mansion, the looping tour guide.
Some others surprisingly funny. Liked the good old rule and day.
My crocodiles are happy in my slime.
drkshadow03's review against another edition
4.0
The City of the Dreadful Night is a long poem that describes melancholy souls full of despair at the meaningless of life wandering a bleak city where it is always night. Along the way, the speaker meets a street preacher describing his journey through the desert, lost souls entering the gates of Dante’s hell, a church for the hopeless and forlorn that blasphemes God, and where the preacher sermonizes on the hopelessness and purposeless of life, encouraging his congregants to commit suicide, an image of an immovable Sphinx symbolizing the immutable and uncaring laws of the universe and life.
Safe to say that this was not a happy poem and had a downright depressing quality, yet at the same time I thoroughly enjoyed the imagery and vision of the poem despite its intense bleakness. This provides an artistic voice that reflects how a severely depressed person views the world or it’s Ecclesiastes “Vanity of Vanity, all is vanity” on steroids.
One interesting scene of the poem alludes to Dante’s Inferno, quoting the sign at entrence to hell where all must abandon hope.
“I reached the portal common spirits fear,
And read the words above it, dark yet clear,
‘Leave hope behind, all ye who enter here:’
And would have passed in, gratified to gain
That positive eternity of pain
Instead of this insufferable inane.”
However, unlike Dante, the speaker of the poem views entering the gates of hell as preferable than his current existence in this bleak city. The choice of the word “inane” here suggests the pointless silliness of his current existence that he finds “insufferable.” He can’t take it anymore!
At least suffering in hell has meaning; people are getting the just recompense of their actions in life. In Dante’s hell you literally suffer an eternal punishment based on the sin you committed in life; the punishment matches the crime. As the scene further shows the speaker stands on a corner begging for a little hope; after all, you have to had some hope in the first place in order to abandon it. In this poem, suffering still exists as part of the world, but our suffering has no meaning. It doesn’t depend on our virtue or wickedness. Good and bad people suffer just because that is just how the universe is. Our actions don’t matter in determining our fates. Likewise, as the poem suggests in a later verse, there is no heaven or hell or devil or God out to reward or punish us. Any hope we might have for a better future is meaningless. This state of hopelessness inspired by the understanding that the world is meaningless and that we still will suffer anyway is far worse than if a hell really did exist for the speaker.
“For in this Limbo we must ever dwell,
Shut out alike from heaven and Earth and Hell.”
For those of a religious bent, there are other things they will probably find distasteful about the poem. At one point, the speaker encounters a sacrilegious description of God who is described as being “the most wretched” Being for having created vile creatures like humanity. However, these snide remarks about the divine are not fueled by humanism, but rather pessimism and nihilism. The poem argues that since humans are such failures and miserable, if there was a Being who created them, It should be ashamed for doing so or wanting to take credit. If a God existed and had actually created humanity It would be the most vile thing for creating something so vile. This is a profane inversion of a common philosophical argument that tries to defend the existence of God by arguing that logically all things and beings must stem from a greater Being and thus the greatest Being, God, is the source of all being. This should be seen as a kind of hypothetical thought experiment—a what if—since the poem continually suggests divine beings don’t exist.
After this description follows a powerful metaphor of the uncaring universe as an endless mill, which keeps grinding “out death and life and good and ill.” This mechanical action has no purpose or meaning. It is mindless like a machine and just is the way the world is.
“And now at last authentic word I bring,
Witnessed by every dead and living thing;
Good tidings of great joy for you, for all:
There is no God; no Fiend with names divine
Made us and tortured us; if we must pine,
It is to satiate no Being’s gall.
It was the dark delusion of a dream,
That living Person conscious and supreme,
Whom we must curse because the life he gave
Could not be buried in the quiet grave,
Could not be killed by poison or the knife.
This little life is all we must endure,
The grave’s most holy peace is ever sure,
We fall asleep and never wake again;
Nothing is of us but the mouldering flesh,
Whose elements dissolve and merge afresh”
This passage comes from the sermon in the church. The middle stanza hints at Jesus’s sacrifice being a “dark delusion of a dream.” It also suggests his inability to die would be a curse rather than a blessing. This passage is a strange twist of a traditional sermon, which normally promises its listeners eternal life and happiness thanks to Jesus’s sacrifice. In this twisted sermon, we are instead told thankfully Jesus (who is the “Person”) that cannot die ñ is a delusional dream and death is a salvation from the pains of life. This freedom in death isn’t an appeal to an afterlife however. Death is just a means of escape from the meaningless and inevitable suffering of life.
The work ultimately is an atheistic and nihilistic poem that suggests life is pointless and full of suffering, there is no afterlife, all we have is this short brief life mostly full of misery and despair, and even when we might find some small moments of happiness these are fleeting and often themselves lead to further despair when we lose them.
Safe to say that this was not a happy poem and had a downright depressing quality, yet at the same time I thoroughly enjoyed the imagery and vision of the poem despite its intense bleakness. This provides an artistic voice that reflects how a severely depressed person views the world or it’s Ecclesiastes “Vanity of Vanity, all is vanity” on steroids.
One interesting scene of the poem alludes to Dante’s Inferno, quoting the sign at entrence to hell where all must abandon hope.
“I reached the portal common spirits fear,
And read the words above it, dark yet clear,
‘Leave hope behind, all ye who enter here:’
And would have passed in, gratified to gain
That positive eternity of pain
Instead of this insufferable inane.”
However, unlike Dante, the speaker of the poem views entering the gates of hell as preferable than his current existence in this bleak city. The choice of the word “inane” here suggests the pointless silliness of his current existence that he finds “insufferable.” He can’t take it anymore!
At least suffering in hell has meaning; people are getting the just recompense of their actions in life. In Dante’s hell you literally suffer an eternal punishment based on the sin you committed in life; the punishment matches the crime. As the scene further shows the speaker stands on a corner begging for a little hope; after all, you have to had some hope in the first place in order to abandon it. In this poem, suffering still exists as part of the world, but our suffering has no meaning. It doesn’t depend on our virtue or wickedness. Good and bad people suffer just because that is just how the universe is. Our actions don’t matter in determining our fates. Likewise, as the poem suggests in a later verse, there is no heaven or hell or devil or God out to reward or punish us. Any hope we might have for a better future is meaningless. This state of hopelessness inspired by the understanding that the world is meaningless and that we still will suffer anyway is far worse than if a hell really did exist for the speaker.
“For in this Limbo we must ever dwell,
Shut out alike from heaven and Earth and Hell.”
For those of a religious bent, there are other things they will probably find distasteful about the poem. At one point, the speaker encounters a sacrilegious description of God who is described as being “the most wretched” Being for having created vile creatures like humanity. However, these snide remarks about the divine are not fueled by humanism, but rather pessimism and nihilism. The poem argues that since humans are such failures and miserable, if there was a Being who created them, It should be ashamed for doing so or wanting to take credit. If a God existed and had actually created humanity It would be the most vile thing for creating something so vile. This is a profane inversion of a common philosophical argument that tries to defend the existence of God by arguing that logically all things and beings must stem from a greater Being and thus the greatest Being, God, is the source of all being. This should be seen as a kind of hypothetical thought experiment—a what if—since the poem continually suggests divine beings don’t exist.
After this description follows a powerful metaphor of the uncaring universe as an endless mill, which keeps grinding “out death and life and good and ill.” This mechanical action has no purpose or meaning. It is mindless like a machine and just is the way the world is.
“And now at last authentic word I bring,
Witnessed by every dead and living thing;
Good tidings of great joy for you, for all:
There is no God; no Fiend with names divine
Made us and tortured us; if we must pine,
It is to satiate no Being’s gall.
It was the dark delusion of a dream,
That living Person conscious and supreme,
Whom we must curse because the life he gave
Could not be buried in the quiet grave,
Could not be killed by poison or the knife.
This little life is all we must endure,
The grave’s most holy peace is ever sure,
We fall asleep and never wake again;
Nothing is of us but the mouldering flesh,
Whose elements dissolve and merge afresh”
This passage comes from the sermon in the church. The middle stanza hints at Jesus’s sacrifice being a “dark delusion of a dream.” It also suggests his inability to die would be a curse rather than a blessing. This passage is a strange twist of a traditional sermon, which normally promises its listeners eternal life and happiness thanks to Jesus’s sacrifice. In this twisted sermon, we are instead told thankfully Jesus (who is the “Person”) that cannot die ñ is a delusional dream and death is a salvation from the pains of life. This freedom in death isn’t an appeal to an afterlife however. Death is just a means of escape from the meaningless and inevitable suffering of life.
The work ultimately is an atheistic and nihilistic poem that suggests life is pointless and full of suffering, there is no afterlife, all we have is this short brief life mostly full of misery and despair, and even when we might find some small moments of happiness these are fleeting and often themselves lead to further despair when we lose them.
bartlebybleaney's review against another edition
4.0
The City of Dreadful Night is one of my favorite poem sequences, but its marvelous gloom and pessimism could not prepare any reader to expect the delicate beauty and freshness Thomson was capable of in many of the short lyrical pieces that form the other part of this collection. As much as I revere The City, I expected Thomson to be rather a one-note poet. I couldn't have been more wrong.
bartlebybleaney's review against another edition
5.0
"no secret can be told
To any who divined it not before"
The poem I've wanted to read/write my entire life. It's what Hardy should have been like, and might have been if he hadn't been waylaid by anapests.
To any who divined it not before"
The poem I've wanted to read/write my entire life. It's what Hardy should have been like, and might have been if he hadn't been waylaid by anapests.
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