Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Death-Wake or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras
    The Death-Wake or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras
    The Death-Wake or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras
    Ebook117 pages1 hour

    The Death-Wake or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras

    By Thomas Tod Stoddart and Andrew Lang

    ()

    Read preview
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 26, 2013
    The Death-Wake or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras

    Read more from Thomas Tod Stoddart

    Related to The Death-Wake or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras

    Related ebooks

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Waste Land turns 100

      Oct 19, 2022

      The Waste Land turns 100
      5 min read

    • Article

      What The Thunder Said

      Sep 14, 2022

      ON Margate Sands./I can connect/ Nothing with nothing.’ Thomas Stearns (T. S.) Eliot crafted these short lines that form a part of his fractured epic The Waste Land in October 1921, as he sat in the inauspicious Nayland Rock Shelter (granted Grade II

      4 min read

    • Article

      Fishing As Breathing

      Apr 20, 2022

      Fishing As Breathing
      5 min read

    • Article

      Under Milk Wood

      Oct 27, 2021

      Under Milk Wood
      2 min read

    • Article

      The Gay Duchess

      Jun 28, 2023

      Blue Eyes and a Wild Spirit: A Life of Dorothy Wellesley By Jane Wellesley Sandstone Press £30 The story of the Royal Family – George VI, the Little Princesses and Queen Elizabeth – all having the giggles when listening to T S Eliot read from The Was

      3 min read

    • Article

      Getting Wrecked

      May 26, 2022

      It took a while, but a happy truth is gradually dawning on our summer opera companies. Reasons for hauling oneself to Glyndebourne (and its dog-and-pony ringers) have always been only tangentially connected to the witnessing of opera: viz. bitterly c

      3 min read

    • Article

      Poet Power

      Jul 12, 2023

      THIS week, we celebrate the 230th anniversary of the birth of John Clare. He may have died in an asylum, but Clare is acknowledged to stand, not only among the finest of 19th-century poets, but as one of the most important commentators upon our prese

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Call Of The Garden

      Oct 4, 2023

      The Call Of The Garden
      5 min read

    • Article

      Spooks From Elmstein To Essex

      Apr 20, 2023

      Spooks From Elmstein To Essex
      10 min read

    • Article

      The Landscape Was His Mistress

      Feb 9, 2022

      IN 1802, John Constable wrote seven observations and resolutions about art. In them, among other things, he pledged to follow Nature, to make ‘unaffected’ pictures, and to avoid ‘common place people’. He also declared that ‘there is no easy way of be

      5 min read

    • Article

      A Potter For Our Times

      Sep 1, 2021

      WHEN perusing this attractively packaged biography of ceramics impresario Josiah Wedgwood (1730–95), your reviewer was prompted to recall one of the few joyous moments of lockdown, Channel 4’s The Great Pottery Throw Down (GPTD): a show that reveals

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Nazi Actor Next Door

      Jun 1, 2022

      Deal in Kent has been nominated as ‘one of the best places to live’ in the United Kingdom for the third consecutive year, according to a survey in the Times. The town has transitioned from being a rather rough resort back in the 1950s – natives remem

      3 min read

    • Article

      Of Pastimes And Pleasures

      Jan 19, 2022

      I POUNCED on this slim volume having just listened to Emma on Audible, beautifully read by Juliet Stevenson. Where and what exactly was Astley’s? Robert Martin was invited by John Knightley to join him ‘at Astley’s’, to which he was taking his two el

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Gentle Giant

      Aug 6, 2020

      Outside South Kensington tube station stands a bronze statue of a slender, diminutive man in overcoat and hat. How Bartók became one of few composers honoured with a London statue deserves a story to itself, but here he is, the self-effacing figure w

      11 min read

    • Article

      Chapter & verse

      Feb 10, 2023

      Chapter & verse
      7 min read

    • Article

      Chapter & verse

      Feb 10, 2023

      Chapter & verse
      7 min read

    • Article

      Cheeky Blinder

      May 27, 2021

      Cheeky Blinder
      6 min read

    • Article

      Poem Of The Week: Poetry For Supper By RS Thomas

      Oct 31, 2022

      ‘Listen, now, verse should be as naturalAs the small tuber that feeds on muck And grows slowly from obtuse soil To the white flower of immortal beauty.’ ‘Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer Said once about the long toil That goes like blood to the poe

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Old Un’s Notes

      Dec 15, 2021

      The Old Un’s Notes
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Old Un’s Notes

      Jan 12, 2022

      The Old Un’s Notes
      6 min read

    • Article

      Alex Ross on Wagner’s Complicated Influence on American Culture

      Sep 14, 2020

      In 1906, McClure’s, the most culturally ambitious and politically outspoken American magazine of the day, hired Willa Cather as an editor. She moved to New York, settled in Greenwich Village, and began attending performances at the Met. Her position

      15 min read

    • Article

      Tales Of Life, Light And Laughter

      Nov 10, 2022

      With the advent of the Christ Child’s birth upon us, it hardly seems appropriate to be recommending these memoirs so wholeheartedly. Great swathes are really quite naughty: we have a frank account of sex in a Parisian porn shop as well as details of

      3 min read

    • Article

      Posh Misery Memoir

      Jan 11, 2023

      By Rory Knight Bruce Mount Orleans Press £20 Rory Knight Bruce was one of Fleet Street's characters in the 1980s and ‘90s: a bit of a legend in his own lunchtime. A Puck-like, Will-o’-the-wisp Withnail in everyone's peripheral vision, he seemed to ap

      3 min read

    Reviews for The Death-Wake or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Death-Wake or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras - Thomas Tod Stoddart

      The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Death-Wake, by Thomas T Stoddart

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

      almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

      re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

      with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

      Title: The Death-Wake

      or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras

      Author: Thomas T Stoddart

      Commentator: Andrew Lang

      Release Date: August 27, 2005 [EBook #16601]

      Language: English

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DEATH-WAKE ***

      Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Sankar Viswanathan and the

      Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

      THE DEATH-WAKE

      OR LUNACY

      A NECROMAUNT

      IN THREE CHIMERAS

      BY THOMAS T. STODDART

      WITH AN INTRODUCTION

      BY ANDREW LANG

      Is't like that lead contains her?...

      It were too gross

      To rib her cerecloth in the obscure grave.

      Shakespeare

      LONDON: JOHN LANE

      CHICAGO: WAY & WILLIAMS

      1895

      CONTENTS

      INTRODUCTION TO THE DEATH-WAKE

      Piscatori

      Piscator

      An angler to an angler here,

      To one who longed not for the bays,

      I bring a little gift and dear,

      A line of love, a word of praise,

      A common memory of the ways,

      By Elibank and Yair that lead;

      Of all the burns, from all the braes,

      That yield their tribute to the Tweed.

      His boyhood found the waters clean,

      His age deplored them, foul with dye;

      But purple hills, and copses green,

      And these old towers he wandered by,

      Still to the simple strains reply

      Of his pure unrepining reed,

      Who lies where he was fain to lie,

      Like Scott, within the sound of Tweed.

      A. L.

      INTRODUCTION

      The extreme rarity of The Death-Wake is a reason for its republication, which may or may not be approved of by collectors. Of the original edition the Author says that more than seventy copies were sold in the first week of publication, but thereafter the publisher failed in business. Mr. Stoddart recovered the sheets of his poem, and his cook gradually, and perhaps not injudiciously, expended them for domestic purposes.

      Apart from its rarity, The Death-Wake has an interest of its own for curious amateurs of poetry. The year of its composition (1830) was the great year of Romanticisme in France, the year of Hernani, and of Gautier's gilet rouge. In France it was a literary age given to mediæval extravagance, to the dagger and the bowl, the cloak and sword, the mad monk and the were-wolf; the age of Pétrus Borel and MacKeat, as well as of Dumas and Hugo. Now the official poetry of our country was untouched by and ignorant of the virtues and excesses of 1830. Wordsworth's bolt was practically shot; Sir Walter was ending his glorious career; Shelley and Byron and Keats were dead, and the annus mirabilis of Coleridge was long gone by. Three young poets of the English-speaking race were producing their volumes, destined at first to temporary neglect. The year 1830 was the year of Mr. Tennyson's Poems, chiefly Lyrical, his first book, not counting Poems by Two Brothers. It was also the year of Mr. Browning's Pauline (rarer even than The Death-Wake); and it was the year which followed the second, and perhaps the most characteristic, poetical venture of Edgar Allan Poe. In Mr. Tennyson's early lyrics, and in Mr. Poe's, any capable judge must have recognised new notes of romance. Their accents are fresh and strange, their imaginations dwell in untrodden regions. Untouched by the French romantic poets, they yet unconsciously reply to their notes, as if some influence in the mental air were at work on both sides of the Channel, on both sides of the Atlantic. Now, in my opinion, this indefinite influence was also making itself felt, faintly and dimly, in Scotland. The Death-Wake is the work of a lad who certainly had read Keats, Coleridge and Shelley, but who is no imitator of these great poets. He has, in a few passages, and at his best, an accent original, distinct, strangely musical, and really replete with promise. He has a fresh unborrowed melody and mastery of words, the first indispensable sign of a true poet. His rhymed heroic verse is no more the rhymed heroic verse of Endymion, than it is that of Mr. Pope, or of Mr. William Morris. He is a new master of the old instrument.

      His mood is that of Scott when Scott was young, and was so anxious to possess a death's head and cross-bones. The malady is most incident to youth, but Mr. Stoddart wears his rue with a difference. The mad monkish lover of the dead nun Agathé has hit on precisely the sort of fantasy which was about to inspire Théophile Gautier's Comédie de la Mort, or the later author of Gaspard de la Nuit, or Edgar Poe. There is here no criticism of life; it is a criticism of strange death; and, so far, may recall Beddoes's Death's Jest-Book, unpublished, of course, in 1830. Naturally this kind of poetry is useless, as Mr. Ruskin says about Coleridge, but, in its bizarre way, it may be beautiful.

      The author, by a curious analogy with Théophile Gautier, was, in these days, a humourist as well as a poet. In the midst of his mad fancies and rare melodies he is laughing at himself, as Théophile mocked at Les Jeunes France. The psychological position is, therefore, one of the rarest. Mr. Stoddart was, first of all and before all, a hardy and enthusiastic angler. Between 1830 and 1840 he wrote a few beautiful angling songs, and then all the poetry of his character merged itself in an ardent love of Nature: of hill, loch and stream—above all, of Tweed, the fairest of waters, which he lived to see a sink

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1