Dream-Pedlary

i.

If there were dreams to sell.
What would you buy?
Some cost a passing bell;
Some a light sigh,
That shakes from Life’s fresh crown
Only a rose-leaf down.
If there were dreams to sell,
Merry and sad to tell,
And the crier rung the bell,
What would you buy?

ii.

A cottage lone and still,
With bowers nigh,
Shadowy, my woes to still,
Until I die.
Such pearl from Life’s fresh crown
Fain would I shake me down.
Were dreams to have at will,
This would best heal my ill,
This would I buy.

iii.

But there were dreams to sell
Ill didst thou buy;
Life is a dream, they tell,
Waking, to die.
Dreaming a dream to prize,
Is wishing ghosts to rise;
And, if I had the spell
To call the buried well
Which one would I?

iv.

If there are ghosts to raise,
What shall I call,
Out of hell’s murky haze,
Heaven’s blue pall?
Raise my loved long-lost boy
To lead me to his joy. –
There are no ghosts to raise;
Out of death lead no ways;
Vain is the call.

v.

Know’st thou not ghosts to sue?
No love thou hast.
Else lie, as I will do,
And breathe thy last.
So out of Life’s fresh crown
Fall like a rose-leaf down.
Thus are the ghosts to woo;
Thus are all dreams made true,
Ever to last!

Dream-Pedlary by the Bristol-born English poet, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, 1803-1849, is the most often anthologised, and arguably most perfect of his lyric poems. It has a music that lifts it immediately from the page, and, although it questions anticipated regularities of scansion, rhyme scheme and form, these minor instabilities in fact contribute to its effectiveness.

The first line, for instance, has various rhythmic possibilities: it works well if scanned as two double dactyls (“If there were dreams to sell”), but also fits the bill as iambic trimeter (“If there were dreams to sell”), or, perhaps most appealingly, a combination: “If there were dreams to sell”. Awareness of that flexibility benefits the reading of the subsequent first lines – the first line of the second stanza, for example, which is rather more effective with the slower movement of three iambs: “A cottage lone and still.”

There’s a further shift, in that the poem seems to begin as a personal, rather whimsical question to the reader (“If there were dreams to sell / What would you buy?”: that suggestion of intimacy certainly helps engage us. But in the second stanza, the speaker answers his own question, and we begin to feel the inwards-turning of his thoughts, sustained until the final stanza, where the “you” and the speaker’s “I” again become separate, or apparently so.

Regarding the rhyme scheme and stanza-form, the first stanza is distinctive in having 10 lines, with lines one and two repeated unchanged, and a little group of triplets that picks up the “A” rhyme: “sell / tell / bell”. That triplet pattern is dropped in the subsequent nine-lined stanzas. Repetition remains important, though: it’s audible throughout, in the three times recurring “crown / down” rhymes, for instance, and the bigger pattern of question-and-answer.

Argument begins to predominate: there had been “dreams to sell” but, the speaker tells himself in stanza three, “ill didst thou buy”. The most urgent question concerns the issue of “ghosts to raise” – a concern born of Beddoes’ practice both in poetry and medicine. His fascination with the gothic in the poems and dramatic writing, Death’s Jest Book in particular, comes from his medical studies, and the serious investigation into post-death spiritual survival. His conclusion that no evidence existed didn’t preclude the poetic argument with mortality.

Beddoes’ search for “a dream to prize” centres on the question of which ghost he would “raise”. He refers to those “buried well”, the adverb hinting that there may be a psychological depth desirable for effective burial. A newly rumoured possibility appears: if “life is a dream”, to die may be to wake to a different level of reality.

The dreamed-of ghost in stanza iv, ”the loved long-lost boy”, is thought to be the Russian medical student, Benjamin Bernhard Reich, with whom Beddoes lived for a year when he himself was studying medicine at Göttingen. The complexity of the poet’s sense of alienation has gained a new dimension from an increasing recognition of his homosexuality. It was integral to the spectrum of his creative and political rebellion, and to his way of life. In continental Europe, he was mostly a wanderer, essentially homeless. In the poem, the earlier dream of the settled dwelling that would “best heal my ill” has particular pathos.

Dream-Pedlary, as it deftly negotiates technical and imaginative integration, shows Beddoes finding his place as a kind of late-Romantic poet: see also his early tribute to Shelley. At the same time, there’s a self-parodic, almost camp consciousness at work: Romantic tropes beget wry questions, delicate metaphors gain fleshly weight. The first-stanza dream (lines five and six) which costs only “a light sigh” rather than the funeral bell, is revised in the fifth stanza, where the “rose-leaf” and “Life’s fresh crown” reappear, differently balanced. The rose-leaf falls less lightly: the certainty larger than the “crown” is the fact of death, and optimistic inferences can only be paradoxical, perhaps made in pure jest: “Thus are the ghosts to woo; / Thus are all dreams made true, / Ever to last!”

• The text (sadly, without the indentations) is copied from Edmund Gosse’s 1890 edition of the Poems, which can be read here.