The Death-Wake

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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
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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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
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 medi?val 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