In the realm of English lyric poetry, few works achieve the haunting, musical resonance of Thomas Lovell Beddoes' 'Dream-Pedlary'. Written by the Bristol-born poet and physician (1803-1849), this frequently anthologised piece is often considered his most perfect creation. Its opening question—'If there were dreams to sell. What would you buy?'—invites the reader into a deeply personal, yet universally resonant, meditation on mortality, desire, and the elusive nature of dreams.
The Poem's Shifting Music and Intimate Address
What immediately strikes a reader of 'Dream-Pedlary' is its captivating musicality, a quality that seems to lift the words directly from the page. The poem deliberately plays with rhythmic expectations. Its very first line can be scanned in multiple ways—as two double dactyls, as iambic trimeter, or a compelling hybrid—establishing a flexible, living rhythm that continues throughout. This technical instability is not a flaw but a feature, contributing significantly to the poem's evocative power.
The structure further guides the emotional journey. The initial stanza, with its ten lines and triplet rhymes ('sell / tell / bell'), poses a whimsical, intimate question directly to the reader. This engaging opening shifts in the second stanza, where the speaker turns inward to answer his own query, longing for 'A cottage lone and still' to soothe his woes until death. This inward focus is sustained until the final stanza, where the 'you' and the 'I' separate once more, creating a poignant conclusion to the internal dialogue.
A Physician-Poet's Argument with Death
The core of 'Dream-Pedlary' moves from whimsy to a profound argument with mortality, a theme deeply informed by Beddoes' dual life as a poet and a medical student. His fascination with the Gothic, particularly evident in his work Death's Jest Book, was fuelled by his scientific investigations into what, if anything, survives physical death. The poem becomes a vessel for this enquiry.
In the third stanza, the tone darkens: 'But there were dreams to sell / Ill didst thou buy; / Life is a dream, they tell, / Waking, to die.' Here, the speaker chastises his own earlier dream-buying. The central, urgent question then becomes one of raising ghosts. Which ghost would he call from 'hell's murky haze' or 'Heaven's blue pall'? The answer reveals a deeply personal loss: the desire to raise his 'loved long-lost boy', believed to be Benjamin Bernhard Reich, a Russian medical student with whom Beddoes lived in Göttingen.
This reference adds a critical layer of modern understanding to the poem. Beddoes' sense of alienation and his creative rebellion are now seen as intertwined with his homosexuality, an aspect of his identity that shaped his life as a wanderer in continental Europe. The dream of a solitary, healing cottage mentioned earlier gains immense pathos in this light—a yearning for stability and peace that remained elusive.
Late-Romantic Mastery and Paradoxical Conclusions
'Dream-Pedlary' showcases Beddoes as a distinctive late-Romantic voice, one who pays tribute to predecessors like Shelley while injecting a self-aware, almost camp consciousness. Romantic tropes are subjected to wry questioning, and delicate metaphors take on fleshly weight. The recurring image of the 'rose-leaf down' shaken from 'Life's fresh crown' evolves in meaning. Initially costing only 'a light sigh', it reappears in the final stanza with heavier, fatalistic implications.
The poem's conclusion embraces a paradoxical, possibly jesting, optimism. Having traversed dreams for sale, ill purchases, and the impossibility of raising ghosts, the speaker arrives at a stark yet lyrical resolution: 'Know'st thou not ghosts to sue? / No love thou hast. / Else lie, as I will do, / And breathe thy last.' True dreaming, it suggests, is accepting mortality. The final lines—'Thus are the ghosts to woo; / Thus are all dreams made true, / Ever to last!'—ring with a complex irony. In accepting death, dreams are paradoxically fulfilled, a fitting end for a poet who so relentlessly probed the boundary between life and what lies beyond.
The text of the poem discussed is sourced from Edmund Gosse's 1890 edition of Beddoes' Poems, preserving this masterful exploration of desire, loss, and the ultimate dream we all must buy.
