Thomas Lovell Beddoes's Dream-Pedlary: form, meter and ghosts

Dream-Pedlary by the Bristol-born poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes is the most often anthologised, and arguably most perfect of his lyric poems, the piece noted for a music that lifts it from the page. The poem questions anticipated regularities of scansion, rhyme scheme and form, and those minor instabilities contribute to its effectiveness.

The poem’s opening line, “If there were dreams to sell,” admits various rhythmic readings — two double dactyls, iambic trimeter, or a combination — a flexibility that benefits subsequent lines such as the slower three-iamb first line of stanza two, “A cottage lone and still.” The first stanza is distinctive in having ten lines, with lines one and two repeated and a triplet picking up the “A” rhyme (“sell / tell / bell”); the later stanzas drop that triplet pattern but keep repetition audible, for example in the three recurring “crown / down” rhymes and the larger question-and-answer structure.

Argument grows through the poem: in stanza three the speaker tells himself “ill didst thou buy,” and the poem’s most urgent question concerns “ghosts to raise.” That concern is linked in the poem to Beddoes’s practice in medicine and his fascination with the gothic in works such as Death’s Jest Book, and to a serious investigation into post-death spiritual survival.

The critic notes that Beddoes concluded no evidence existed for survival, but that did not preclude his poetic engagement with mortality.

Key Topics

Culture, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Dream-pedlary, Benjamin Bernhard Reich, Göttingen, Death's Jest Book