City of Dreadful Night

As Reme says, reading makes you a better writer. With this in mind, I started looking for some Victorian poetry and I found something marvellous. I love poetry as long as it is highly demanding, and shows the author’s control of the language. When I was a child it didn’t use to like it because I found it pretentious – and I didn’t like children’s poems because they were stupid- but when I was about 14, I read a poem called La última lamentación de Lord Byron, by Gaspar Núñez de Arce, that attracted me to poetry. I would quote some verses, but it is an Spanish poem and it is quite long, so it wouldn’t be very useful…- anyway, if you want to read it, I'll leave a link down bellow. 

Therefore, I started reading Lord Byron, William Blake and some more, and now I can say poetry thrills me, it really does. The important thing is that today I discovered a Victorian poem named City of Dreadful Night, written by a Scottish poet whose name was James B. V. Thompson. It is about the author’s loss of faith. The city of dreadful night is supposed to be London, seen by a despairing atheist. I find these verses hopeless, pessimistic and melancholic, the lack of eagerness is evident. However, I like that style; I find it so desperate that moves me. I guess I like that sort of gothic stuff.

Without further delay, here a fragment of the long poem, City of Dreadful Night: 

O melancholy Brothers, dark, dark, dark!                   25

O battling in black floods without an ark!

  O spectral wanderers of unholy Night!

My soul hath bled for you these sunless years,

With bitter blood-drops running down like tears:

  Oh dark, dark, dark, withdrawn from joy and light!       30

My heart is sick with anguish for your bale;

Your woe hath been my anguish; yea, I quail

  And perish in your perishing unblest.

And I have searched the highths and depths, the scope

Of all our universe, with desperate hope                    35

  To find some solace for your wild unrest.

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                 40

Made us and tortures 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 for cursing us with life;              45

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,                   50

  We fall asleep and never wake again;

Nothing is of us but the mouldering flesh,

Whose elements dissolve and merge afresh

  In earth, air, water, plants, and other men.

We finish thus; and all our wretched race                   55

Shall finish with its cycle, and give place

  To other beings with their own time-doom:

Infinite aeons ere our kind began;

Infinite aeons after the last man

  Has joined the mammoth in earth's tomb and womb.         60

We bow down to the universal laws,

Which never had for man a special clause

  Of cruelty or kindness, love or hate:

If toads and vultures are obscene to sight,

If tigers burn with beauty and with might,                  65

  Is it by favour or by wrath of Fate?

Enjoy it and goodnight!

LINK to the entire poem: http://emotionalliteracyeducation.com/classic_books_online/ctdnt10.htm

LINK to "La última lamentación de Lord Byron": 

http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/ultima-lamentacion-de-lord-byron-poema--0/html/ff1fc088-82b1-11df-acc7-002185ce6064_2.html#I_2_