The Death-Wake

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Stoddart
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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 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