| Front | City of Dreadful Night |
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| Back | poem James Thomson 1874 it takes its motto from Leopardi; 'in thee, o death , our naked nature finds response; not joyful , but safe from the old sadness' this poem is a work of profound desolation , a requiem to disillusionment and negation it reflected on the meaninglessness of the human condition, on the death -in-life Thomson believed man must endure sinister imagery , dramatic scenes , and brooding despair render the poem unique in the literature of despondency as well as a landmark in late-Victorian pessimism. The City of Dreadful Night is a long poem by the Scottish poet James "B.V." Thomson, written between 1870 and 1873, and published in the National Reformer in 1874,[1] then in 1880 in a book entitled The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems. Thomson, who sometimes used the pseudonym "Bysshe Vanolis" — in honour of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Novalis — was a thorough pessimist, suffering from lifelong melancholia and clinical depression, as well as a wanderlust that took him to Colorado and to Spain, among other places. The City of Dreadful Night that gave its title to this poem, however, was made in the image of London. The poem, despite its insistently bleak tone, won the praise of George Meredith, and also of George Saintsbury, who in A History of Nineteenth Century Literature wrote that "what saves Thomson is the perfection with which he expresses the negative and hopeless side of the sense of mystery ..."[citation needed] |
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