xiv

Death’s Jest-Book

Far from being merely the poet’s latest attempt at tragic theatre, Death’s Jest-Book was clearly assuming a privileged status in his imagination, transcending the journeyman-work of 1822 to ’24. Death’s Jest-Book is presented now as an experimental fusing of arts and sciences. And in that last sentence, Beddoes offers a personal reassurance to Kelsall, who more than anyone encouraged and supported him with belief in the importance of his literary talent, that medicine was not claiming him away from poetry; on the contrary, he argues, the medical and the poetic have become mutually sustaining, co-operating towards a higher synthesis. In these heady early days of the Jest-Book, Beddoes shows himself to be full of cheerful cussedness and impetuous confidence:

Death’s Jest-book goes on like the tortoise — slow & sure; I think it will be entertaining, very unamiable, & utterly unpopular. (p. 610) Apollo has been barbarously separated by the moderns: I would endeavour to unite him. (p. 611) But all these boasts are rather general: apart from fusing the medical and the literary in a psychological enquiry, apart from getting up the nose of the complacent English reader, what was Death’s Jest-Book really about? What did it contain? It was in a verse letter to his friend the poet Bryan Waller Procter (‘Barry Cornwall’) in March 1826, that Beddoes gave the most spirited and startling account of the genesis of his new tragedy, and formally announced its theme:

… I have been

Giving some negro minutes of the night Freed from the slavery of my ruling spright Anatomy the grim, to a new story In whose satiric pathos we will glory. In it Despair has married wildest Mirth And to their wedding-banquet all the earth Is bade to bring its enmities and loves Triumphs and horrors: you shall see the doves Billing with quiet joy and all the while Their nests’s the scull of some old king of Nile: But he who fills the cup and makes the jest Pipes to the dancers, is the fool o’ the feast. Who’s he? I’ve dug him up and decked him trim