With joys and sorrows, health and foul disease, So that no man there breathes earth’s simple breath, It is with our life fraught and overfraught. Is charged with human feeling, human thought Įach shout and cry and laugh, each curse and prayer,Īre breathed into it with our respiration Even in that other nightmare vision of the modern city, Eliot’s The Waste Land, there is the hint of some hope, but here there is none. In Masao Miyoshi’s words: ‘ the desolation of the decomposing self permeates the dreadful night of his vision’.įor the poet wandering the city streets there is no alternative vision and no contrast to the unremitting gloom, as a result of which there is a complete absence of any hope. In Thomson’s eyes the hopes and everyday concerns of the inhabitants of the ‘real’ London are just daydreams eventually they will awake from what they think is reality and embrace ‘ this real night’. There is no God no fiend with names divine But the wanderers walk, not to arrive, not to satisfy any purpose, but to make a kind of penance to the silent, impersonal ‘ necessity supreme’ that permeates the entire city: As he walks he encounters other aimless wanderers, in fact the city teems with people: it is a haunted space. Thomson’s narrator is an alienated wanderer, a joyless flâneur. Which has no power, but sitteth wan and cold,Īnd sees the madness, and foresees as plainly A world where its inhabitants merely follow their allocated roles within a continually-running machine:Īnd outward madness not to be controlled
This very mechanical structure seems to suggest an inhuman, mechanical world. The poem’s structure is interesting – it alternates odd-numbered seven-line sections giving description with even-numbered six-line sections giving narrative. In terms of atmosphere it can be viewed as part of the Gothic tradition, but the setting is a supposedly modern city. The City of Dreadful Night takes the form of the poet’s journey through one night in the city and suggests a reworking of Dante’s Inferno. This, worse than woe, makes wretches there insane. Or which some moments’ stupor but increases, Of thought and consciousness which never ceases, The pitiless hours like years and ages creep,Ī night seems termless hell.
There sweet sleep is not for the weary brain The City is of Night, but not of but not of Sleep A place permeated by loss of belief, loss of purpose and loss of hope. But it is not the dynamic hub of Empire of the popular imagination: for him it is a city of death in life. The city of Thomson’s poem is clearly an imagined London. Williams asserts that, by the Victorian-era, the city had become a new form of human consciousness. Raymond Williams calls The City of Dreadful Night: ‘ a symbolic vision of the city as a condition of human life’. Thomson wrote The Doom of the City in 1857 and his best known poem, The City of Dreadful Night in 1874. He struggled with depression, insomnia and alcohol-abuse throughout his short life and his work frequently reflected the bleakness and despair of his life’s experiences. James Thomson was a Scottish-born poet, atheist and anarchist.