Poetry Codex

Victorian

James Thomson (B.V.)

1834–1882

James Thomson (1834–1882), who wrote as "B.V.", was a Scottish poet and essayist who made his living in London as a clerk and journalist. His best-known work, The City of Dreadful Night, appeared in the National Reformer in 1874 and in book form in 1880.

The poems filed here come from three volumes: The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems (1880), Vane's Story, Weddah and Om-el-Bonain, and Other Poems (1881), and A Voice from the Nile, and Other Poems (1884). His "Attempts at Translation from Heine" are filed under Heinrich Heine, and The City of Dreadful Night itself stands as a work.

Major Works (1)

  1. The City of Dreadful Night — Poem sequence, 1880

Poems (68)

  1. To Our Ladies of Death
  2. In the Room
  3. Sunday at Hampstead
  4. Sunday up the River: An Idyll of Cockaigne
  5. The Naked Goddess
  6. Art
  7. Philosophy
  8. Life's Hebe
  9. A Polish Insurgent
  10. L'Ancien Regime; or, The Good Old Rule
  11. To a Pianiste
  12. Virtue and Vice
  13. The Three that shall be One
  14. E. B. B.
  15. The Lord of the Castle of Indolence
  16. A Recusant
  17. Vane's Story
  18. Weddah and Om-el-Bonain
  19. Two Lovers
  20. Bertram to the Most Noble and Beautiful Lady, Geraldine
  21. The Fadeless Bower
  22. Garibaldi Revisiting England
  23. Europe's Rouge et Noir
  24. The Jolly Veterans
  25. A Capstan Chorus
  26. Polycrates on Waterloo Bridge
  27. Shameless
  28. The Fire that Filled my Heart of Old
  29. Withered Leaves
  30. The Cypress and the Roses
  31. Meeting Again
  32. Two Sonnets
  33. A Song of Sighing
  34. "Allace! that samyn sweit face!"
  35. Day
  36. Night
  37. Mater Tenebrarum
  38. A Requiem
  39. Childhood
  40. A Voice from the Nile
  41. Richard Forest's Midsummer Night
  42. Insomnia
  43. He Heard Her Sing
  44. The Poet and his Muse
  45. The Sleeper
  46. Modern Penelope
  47. At Belvoir
  48. A Stranger
  49. Law v. Gospel
  50. The Old Story and the New Storey
  51. Despotism Tempered by Dynamite
  52. The Doom of a City
  53. The Deliverer
  54. A Festival of Life
  55. Tasso to Leonora
  56. A Happy Poet
  57. Suggested by Matthew Arnold's "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse"
  58. By the Sea
  59. Prologue to the Pilgrimage to Saint Nicotine of the Holy Herb
  60. Arch Archery
  61. Low Life
  62. The Dreamer
  63. Robert Burns
  64. William Blake
  65. Song
  66. A Chant
  67. On a Broken Pipe
  68. A Proem

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