Shivering in fever, weak, and parched to sand,
My ears, those entrances of word-dressed thoughts,
My pictured eyes, and my assuring touch,
Fell from me, and my body turned me forth
From its beloved abode: then I was dead;
And in my grave beside my corpse I sat,
In vain attempting to return: meantime
There came the untimely spectres of two babes,
And played in my abandoned body’s ruins;
They went away; and, one by one, by snakes
My limbs were swallowed; and, at last, I sat
With only one, blue-eyed, curled round my ribs,
Eating the last remainder of my heart,
And hissing to himself. O sleep, thou fiend!
Thou blackness of the night! how sad and frightful
Are these thy dreams!

“Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849) is a latter-day Jacobean, the author of blank verse plays and poems which are as bold, wild and fresh as they are archaic in manner. We read his plays less for character and drama than for the miracles that occur in their language. He is a poet of fragments. His mastery of lyric and ballad make his work immediately accessible; an obsession with death aligns him with the Decadents. Dream Pedlary, with its potent eroticism, and Death’s Jest Book are masterpieces in what John Ashbery calls the ‘unlikely but addictive bouquet’ of Beddoes’s verse. A nephew of Maria Edgeworth, Beddoes was born in Bristol. Educated at Charterhouse and Pembroke College, Oxford, he went to the Continent to study medicine. He committed suicide at the age of 45.” – From Thomas Lovell Beddoes: Selected Poems, edited by Judith Higgens