The Poetry of Chatterton by Thomas Chatterton

First published:An Elegy on the Much-Lamented Death of Wm. Beckford . . ., 1770; Poems (Supposed to have been written at Bristol by Thomas Rowley and others in the fifteenth century), 1777; Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, 1778; Works, 1803

Critical Evaluation:

Thomas Chatterton’s poetry is usually divided into his own poems, published in his lifetime, and those of his alter ego, the imaginary monk “Thomas Rowley” whom Chatterton asserted wrote many of the “fifteenth century” poems allegedly transcribed from vellum manuscripts found in the muniment room of St. Mary Redcliffe in Bristol and carried off by his father, the sexton, as curiosities useful for covering schoolbooks. Chatterton is remembered for his incredible facility in meters, for his suicide at seventeen, and for his imposture. The worst aspect of his last claim to fame was his attempt to impose on Horace Walpole, who had written a history of the development of styles, a fabricated transcription of a description of English painting in the fifteenth century; this hoax was a continuation of that by which Chatterton first got into print, his equally false transcription of ceremonies marking the opening of the old bridge across the Severn at Bristol, which Chatterton sent to the Bristol Journal in September, 1768, on the occasion of the opening of the new bridge. When he attempted to pass the Rowley poems as equally genuine, Chatterton became the victim not only of his provincial environment but of his age.

London and mid-eighteenth century England were booming with the mercantile revolution which was carrying British manufactures all over the world; the industrial and agricultural revolutions were shifting the bases of English society; the mental unrest and speculation accompanying these phenomena were pushing back the frontiers of space and time. Exotic locales were being employed in a literary style still grounded in classical modernation and exactitude, as in Samuel Johnson’s RASSELAS and his JOURNEY TO THE WESTERN ISLANDS OF SCOTLAND. Further, a curiosity about the past literature of the British Isles produced at first all sorts of curiousa from the dark and deliciously primitive past: the FRAGMENTS of the fake “Ossian” and Percy’s RELIQUES. The classical temper fought to control the “night thoughts” and “sentimental journeys,” but the public was infatuated with the Gothic. The whirlwind was reaped in the American and French revolutions and the Romantic Period before the century was out.

Chatterton shared and tried to capitalize on the changing taste of the time by creating a fifteenth century Bristol, his “city of refuge” as George Sherburn called it. In the verse and prose he managed to sell or publish from Bristol and, during his last four months, in London, he used conventional modes felicitously and sought the taste of time in his “African Eclogues” and the Rowley poems. But he could not endure the life of Grub Street and “perished in his pride,” caught exactly in the middle of the clash between old style and new taste which Thomson earlier avoided in the SEASONS and Crabbe later in THE VILLAGE, the beginning and the end of the pre-Romantic pastoral. Chatterton became the property of the Romantics as “the marvellous boy” of Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence,” which continues

We poets in our youth begin in glad-ness;But thereof come in the end despond-ency and madness.

The romantic feeling toward Chatterton, at once the pathos of blighted youth and of pure genius, is summed up in the well-known painting of his deathbed by Wallis.

The nineteenth century held that the Rowley poems were superior to the rest, but a finer ear both for the eighteenth century coventions of and for the true Chaucerian language and meters has reversed the verdict.

Although Chatterton probably actually faked only a few short poems on parchment (those now in the British Museum), he was able to press most of the more than forty pieces known as the Rowley poems on grateful but not penny-wise patrons in Bristol in the eighteen months between the opening of the bridge and his departure for London. These were turned over to F. Tyrwhitt for his edition in 1778 of the poems of “Thomas Rowley,” confessor to William Canning, the Bristol merchant who restored St. Mary Redcliffe in the late fifteenth century. The rest of Chatterton’s manuscripts, including the essay on painting he sent to Walpole and the glossary he constructed to antiquate the language of the Rowley poems, were probably lost in the drift of torn-up manuscripts that surrounded the poet on his deathbed.

The longest of the Rowley poems is “Ella,” subtitled “A Tragycal Enterlude, or Discoorseynge Tragedie, Wrotten Bie Thomas Rowleie; Plaiedd Before Mastre Canynge,” which is the tragedy of Aella, warden of “Bristowe” Castle, told in operatic and prolonged exchanges plentifully interrupted by the songs of minstrels and other interludes including a Soldier’s Chorus.

On the eve of Aella’s marriage to Birtha his friend, Celmonde, the disappointed lover of Birtha, vows vengeance:

Ytt cannotte, muste notte, naie, yttshalle not bee,Thys nyghte I’ll putte stronge poysonnynn the beere . . .

Before he can do so news comes of a Danish attack and Aella tears himself away from Birtha and, accompanied by Celmonde, defeats the Danes under a chief named Hurra; Celmonde posts back from the field of battle to Bristol and persuades Birtha to go with him to the wounded Aella; on the way, while they are traveling through a wood he attempts to seduce Birtha; but he is killed by the fleeing Hurra, who then escorts Birtha back to Aella. But Aella, unhappily returned to Bristol before her and convinced of her treachery, kills himself as Birtha appears. “Aella” is surrounded by dedicatory epistles, from Rowley to Canning, and several other Rowley poems refer to this masterpiece. Another tragedy, “Goddwyn,” is supposed to have been written and acted by Rowley for the entertainment of Canning.

The best known of the Rowley poems are probably “An Excellente Balade of Charitie,” dated 1464, the first of the Rowley productions, and the “Bristowe Tragedie,” a ballad of ninety-eight stanzas on the execution of “Syr Charles Bawdin,” based on the execution for treason of Sir Baldewyn Fulford in 1461. Several poems are in ballad meter, but others show considerable variety of meters, such as the Spenserian stanza of the second version of the “Battle of Hastings.” Chatterton’s method was simply to write up an ancient occasion in a reasonably appropriate meter and then “antique” it with the help of his glossary; the antiquity can be easily faulted by mistakes in content and errors in language, just as the parchments are obviously antiqued with casual stains. A comparison of “The Romaunte of the Cnyghte,” presented to a Bristol pewterer, an early patron mentioned in “Chatterton’s Will,” as a work by one of his ancestors, and “The Romance of The Knight” in his acknowledged poems show Chatterton’s fatal facility in both quaint and conventional verse:

The woddie Grasse blaunched theFenne . . .Syr Knyghte dyd ymounte oponn aStedeNe Rouncie ne Dryblette ofmake . . .The wrinkled grass its silver joys un-fold . . .The worthy knight ascends his foamingsteed,Of size uncommon, and no commonbreed . . .

The acknowledged poems are as varied as the Rowleys. The longest works are “The Revenge,” the “burletta” which Chatterton sold for five guineas and which was performed at Marylebone Gardens the year after his death, and a long satiric poem, “Kew Gardens.” “The Revenge” burlesques in five scenes the classical gods Jove, Juno, Bacchus, and Cupid in a domestic squabble concerned with Jove’s roving eye. Juno’s revenge consists of pretending to be Maia, Jove’s latest love. Bacchus confuses the issue by imitating Jove, and husband and wife are reconciled with Juno’s promise to give over scolding. The recitative is in heroic couplets, the airs in a great variety of doggerel meters, the whole a spritely and slightly bawdy performance. “Kew Gardens” is over one thousand lines of “flyting” at the statesmen and public figures of the day, including those Bristol patrons also satirized in “Chatterton’s Will,” the poem composed in April, 1770, which is supposed to have procured Chatterton’s dismissal from his clerkship in the Bristol law office and to have prompted his journey to London.

Some of the other poems, such as “The Consuliad,” are likewise in couplets and on public issues, but about half the poems are verse epistles to friends and young ladies in Bristol. The most interesting are the “Elegy on the Death of Mr. Phillips,” a young Bristol acquaintance who stimulated Chatterton to write poetry, and the “African Eclogues,” three short poems in what has been called the “Orinooko tradition”: “Narva and Mored,” “The Death of Nicou,” and “Heccar and Gaira.” Set in an Africa as rude and mysterious as the legendary past of Britain whence the ballads were revived, the eclogues anticipate the effect of “Kubla Khan” in these lines from “Narva and Mored”:

Sudden beneath Toddida’s whistlingbrink,The circling billows in wild eddies sink,Whirl furious round, and the loudbursting waveSinks down to Chalma’s sacerdotal cave.

The “Elegy” is a perfectly formal eighteenth century expression of sorrow, ending with one of the very few references to the poet:

Few are the pleasures Chatterton e’erknew,Short were the moments of his transientpeace;But melancholy robb’d him of thosefew,And this hath bid all future comfortcease.

He knows, however, that the course of his tragedy lies in the disparity between his situation in the provinces and his remarkable gifts. The “Elegy” on Phillips concludes:

And each and every couplet I havepenn’d,But little labour’d, and I never mend.

And in “Chatterton’s Will” he addresses his greedy, gullible, and mean provincial patrons:

If ever obligated to thy purse,Rowley discharges all—my first chiefcurse!For had I never known the antique lore,I ne’er had ventured from my peacefulshore,To be the wreck of promises and hopes,A Boy of Learning, and a Bard ofTropes.