Sonnet: To Tartar, a Terrier Beauty
Snowdrop of dogs, with ear of brownest dye,
Like the last orphan leaf of naked tree
Which shudders in bleak autumn; though by thee,
Of hearing careless and untutored eye,
Not understood articulate speech of men
Nor marked the artificial mind of books,
The mortal’s voice eternized by the pen,
Yet hast thou thought and language all unknown
To Babel’s scholars; oft intensest looks,
Long scrutiny o’er some dark-veined stone
Dost thou bestow, learning dead mysteries
Of the world’s birth-day, oft in eager tone
With quick-tailed fellows bandiest prompt replies,
Solicitudes canine, four-footed amities.
THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES
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The English poet and playwright Thomas Lovell Beddoes was born in Clifton, Bristol, in 1803, into a loving, enlightened and high-achieving family. His mother was a sister of the novelist Maria Edgeworth, his father a distinguished physician, with politically radical views. Dr Beddoes died when his young son was only five years old.
Educated at Charterhouse and Oxford, Thomas initially seemed set for a brilliant literary career. He published his first collection of poetry, The Improvisatore, in 1821, in his first year as a student: a year later, his play, The Bride’s Tragedy, was performed to critical acclaim. Then another, real-life tragedy occurred. On hearing that his mother had been taken ill abroad, Thomas hurriedly left Oxford for Italy, only to discover on arrival that she had already died. He dropped out of Oxford shortly afterwards and went to Germany to study medicine. His literary career and, it seems, his mental stability, were never to recover.
Beddoes is best known for what he called the “florid gothic” of Death’s Jest Book, a verse play that occupied him for the rest of his short life. It was never performed. He was one of those playwrights whose hopeless if admirable quest was to return English verse drama to its Elizabethan glory. Christopher Ricks, a spirited advocate of Beddoes’ poetry, suggests that the dramatic monologue would have been the ideal vehicle for his gifts. Beddoes was born too early: Robert Browning (1812-1889) had yet to illuminate the way.
Beddoes remains a fascinating and sometimes startlingly good poet. When he turns his attention to smaller players in the jest-book of mortality, as in this week’s poem, the imaginative scrutiny remains intense. There’s a disproportionality about his address to this “snowdrop of dogs”, which animates the ordinary doggy presence and amplifies its mystery from the start – or almost from the start. The first line summons innocent springtime hopes by connecting the little white terrier with the English year’s earliest flower, though “ear of brownest dye” seems merely conventionally descriptive. And then Tartar’s “ear” is transfigured by a detailed simile that, although visually alert (a terrier’s ear isn’t at all unlike some kinds of autumn leaf in shape and colour), seems to rebound from a submerged gloomy mood in the narrator. The effect of “the last orphaned leaf of naked tree / Which shudders in bleak autumn” is to overwhelm springtime hopes with mortal decay.
Beddoes then changes tack, and works exuberantly to reveal Tartar’s intelligence and jauntiness. First, there’s a listing of the dog’s limitations. These are rooted in his inability to understand human language. The narrator’s sympathies are clearly aroused. It seems the poet, too, may have formed a disenchanted view of “the artificial mind of books, / The mortal’s voice eternized by the pen”. Tartar’s apparent limitations become, more happily, the basis of the argument for his superiority of understanding: “Yet hast thou thought and language all unknown / To Babel’s scholars …” The dog might be a surrogate for the thinkers and scientists undervalued because of gifts uncongenial to the conventions of their time.
All the same, despite the element of self-portraiture, the acknowledgment of a level of animal intelligence, to whose secrets human intelligence is so far unequal, is radical and forward-looking. There’s more than hyperbole in the image of the inarticulate dog conducting his in-depth geological investigations by non-verbal means: “Long scrutiny o’er some dark-veined stone / Dost thou bestow, learning dead mysteries / Of the world’s birth-day.”
Tartar not only has a scientific understanding of his own: he’s a member of a community, and delights in conversation with his species. We can readily hear the “eager tone” of the barks and yelps, and see the jostle and bustle of those wonderfully termed “solicitudes canine”.
The sonnet to Tartar is somewhat unconventional in rhyme, tempo and syntax – a little unwieldy, perhaps. It seems the right form for the dog as Beddoes so generously and lovingly imagines him – fully alive and aware in ways the narrator-poet doesn’t pretend to understand, and enjoying the rich social life from which he is excluded. The pathos of that “last orphan leaf” is almost, but never entirely, extinguished.