The conference theme is “the city and the book”; my question is whether we can read the city the way we do a book, and my title is “Pope’s Thames.” I’ll begin with a confession on how I settled on this title. I’ve long been interested in Pope as an urban creature, and because he’s the eighteenth-century poet most associated with the river, I settled on “Pope’s Thames”—partly because I liked the sound of it, partly because it was broad enough to cover anything I might have to say on the subject.
But, having settled on a title, I struggled to say something coherent about a river and a poet. It’s easy to catalogue facts, but difficult to say anything specifically poetic about the Thames. Eventually, though, I realized that both Pope and I were having the same trouble finding a poetic way to address the Thames. My problems, I discovered, were Pope’s problems. (I’m pleased to announce that the converse isn’t true, and that Pope’s problems aren’t necessarily mine.) So I’d like to discuss the difficulties Pope faced in trying to address the river in his poetry.
The Thames played a bigger part in Pope’s life than it does in most of ours—as it did for virtually everyone in the eighteenth century. How often are most of us on a river? When we have to get from one side of the Thames to the other, we have our choice of bridges, ranging from the gloriously picturesque to the grimly utilitarian. That wasn’t the case in Pope’s day, when only one bridge crossed the Thames in the London area, the old London Bridge, which stood until 1831. Even Westminster Bridge didn’t open until 1750, six years after Pope’s death. If you wanted to cross the river in the early eighteenth century, if you wanted to travel to London from outlying areas, or even if you wanted to travel east–west within London, a boat was usually the best, and often the only, way to go. Everyone was dependent on watermen. And Pope, as we’ll see, had a special interest in the river, more than most eighteenth-century Londoners. He built his house at Twickenham directly on the banks of the Thames.
So it’s only natural that the Thames should feature in Pope’s poetry. Those who know his major poems will remember several references to the river. Windsor-Forest, for instance, invokes “the fair Lodona,” offspring of Father Thames, and the poem ends with a prophecy of Britain’s future glory:
The Time shall come, when free as Seas or Wind
Unbounded Thames shall flow for all Mankind.
And Pope’s last great poem, The Dunciad, is parodically structured around the Lord Mayor’s Day, which, since the middle fifteenth century, included a procession of barges on the Thames.
Of course Pope wasn’t the first to treat a river poetically. The rivers of mythology make frequent appearances in verse: Phlegethon, Lethe, Styx. And most of the real world’s great rivers have featured in poetry: the Amazon, the Po, the Seine, the Rhine, the Liffey. Enobarbus’s description of Cleopatra on the Nile is well known: “The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne/Burned on the water.” The Ganges is invoked whenever English poets want to explore the boundaries of the known world. Even the Mighty Mississip’ shows up in poetry—helped, perhaps, by the fact that “Mississippi” is a perfect trochee. I imagine few are familiar with Richard Emmons’s masterpiece, The Fredoniad; or, Independence Preserved: An Epick Poem on the Late War of 1812, where in canto 40—yes, there are forty cantos spread out over four volumes, in a poem more than thrice the length of Paradise Lost—we have a rousing declaration:
Soon, I in person shall augment your powers—
The Mississippi and her floods are ours!
Within the last century Hart Crane resorted to jazz rhythms to describe the East River, William Carlos Williams rhapsodized over the Passaic, and the American bard Woody Guthrie tried to give the Columbia River a mythical resonance.
It’s possible to impose some order on this miscellaneous survey, because rivers tend to be associated with a few poetic kinds. Consider the pastoral. You can’t walk far into the canon of pastoral poetry before you find yourself standing in a stream. Georgic, pastoral’s cousin-german, shares many of the same potamological interests. The landscape of heroic poetry is crossed by countless rivers, and locodescriptive poetry is almost always focused on a landscape crossed by at least one river.
That’s rivers generally; of course there’s also a more specific tradition of Thames poetry. Spenser’s Prothalamion of 1596 is probably the single most resonant of Thames poems, with its refrain, “Sweete Themmes runne softly, till I end my Song,” setting up T. S. Eliot’s famous echo in “The Fire Sermon” section of The Waste Land. The middle seventeenth century produced Denham’s Coopers Hill, which contains in its description of the Thames some of the most quoted, most imitated, and most parodied lines in all of seventeenth-century English verse:
O could I flow like thee, and make thy streame
My great example, as it is my theme!
Though deep, yet cleare, though Gentle, yet not dull,
Strong without rage, without ore-flowing full.
By the early eighteenth century everyone knew them, and in 1757 Charles Peters called these verses “The most celebrated lines, perhaps, in all our English poetry.”
So that’s the Thames of English poetic tradition. It’s no surprise that it’s also the Thames of Pope’s early works, when he most felt the pressure of that tradition. Like every aspiring poet who knew the Virgilian cursus honorum, he began with pastoral poetry. Here’s the opening of his first pastoral, Spring:
First in these Fields I try the Sylvan Strains,
Nor blush to sport on Windsor’s blissful Plains:
Fair Thames flow gently from thy sacred Spring,
While on thy Banks Sicilian Muses sing;
Let Vernal Airs thro’ trembling Osiers play,
And Albion’s Cliffs resound the Rural Lay.
Pope wrote these lines at the age of just sixteen, and yet they show a virtuoso’s poetic talents—perhaps a tad ostentatiously. The “Sicilian Muses” recall pastoral pioneer Theocritus, who hailed from Sicily; they also echo the opening of Dryden’s translation of the Pollio, the famous fourth Eclogue. Just as Theocritus opens the pastoral tradition with an invocation of a spring, Pope traces the Thames from its “sacred Spring.” Calling England “Albion” at once mythologizes England and anglicizes mythology. And in exhorting “Fair Thames” to “flow gently,” he echoes Spenser’s “Sweete Themmes runne softly.” Later in the same poem, Strephon suggests the Thames is all an English poet, or shepherd, needs; the rest of the world’s rivers are supererogatory:
O’er Golden Sands let rich Pactolus flow,
And Trees weep Amber on the Banks of Po;
Blest Thames’s Shores the brightest Beauties yield,
Feed here my Lambs, I’ll seek no distant field.
So the Pastorals make the case that the Thames is in the same literary league as the great rivers of antiquity, just as the juvenile poet is making the case that he is in the same literary league as the great poets of antiquity. But all of this is backward-looking and, however impressive it may be as a display of prosodic fireworks and allusive exuberance, it’s both limited and limiting. I don’t want to degenerate into a discussion of the ways in which Pope filched from the classical tradition, turning the Thames into the great rivers of Greece and Rome. And I’m happy that I don’t have to, because some of the charms of Greece and Rome dissipated as Pope matured.
As Pope’s career progressed, he began turning his attention to the modern Thames, which was an increasingly commercial river, linking London to empire. Windsor-Forest therefore combines elements of pastoral, georgic, and locodescriptive verse into a new hybrid better able to describe the modern river. Windsor-Forest, that is to say, is not so much a continuity of older poetic conventions but a departure from them. Pope sought to say something new, something about the Thames of the eighteenth century.
The problem is that the Thames of the eighteenth century wasn’t particularly poetic, and at least in the usual definition of “poetic.” In the western suburbs it may have been deep yet clear, but around Westminster and the City it was shallow, turbid, and filthy. London Bridge made the famous “frost fairs” possible; it impeded the flow of water, allowing ice to collect and the river to freeze solid. Unfortunately, the same fluid dynamics also allowed garbage and sewage to collect and stink.
Complaints about the Thames go back at least to the fourteenth century, so it’s not as if the river suddenly became filthy in 1715. But increasing urbanization made it filthier faster. As early as 1627 a lawsuit targeted an alum manufacturer who produced the chemical by boiling urine and dumping what remained directly into the Thames. In 1661 John Evelyn’s delightfully titled Fumifugium lamented the air pollution that was settling on the Thames and making everything dirty and smelly. In 1671 an imaginative preacher declared that “The wicked deal with God, as we do with the Thames. The Thames brings us in our riches, our Gold, Silks, Spces, and we throw all our filth into the Thames.” By the early nineteenth century the Thames was a revolting slop of “monster soup.”
The care of the river therefore became an ever larger political concern. Rivers were being overfished, waste was making it difficult to breathe, and accumulated sludge was causing boats to get stuck. What’s more, “It is well known,” wrote James Boswell, “that there was formerly a rude custom for those who were sailing upon the Thames, to accost each other as they passed, in the most abusive language they could invent, generally, however, with as much satirical humour as they were capable of producing.” Ned Ward gives a fine specimen of this ritualized raillery in The London-Spy, one worth quoting at some length. The narrator explains that he entered the wherry of “a Jolly Grizzle-Pated Charm,” when “a scoundrel crew of Lambeth Gardeners” let loose a string of insults:
You couple of treacherous Sons of Bridewell B—s, who are Pimps to your own Mothers, Stallions to your Sisters, and Cock-Bawds to the rest of your Relations; Who were begot by Huffing, spew’d up, and not Born; and Christen’d out of a Chamber-pot; How dare you show your Ugly Faces upon the River of Thames . . . ? You Lousie starv’d Crew of Worm-pickers, and Snail-Catchers; You Offspring of a Dunghill, and Brothers to a Pumpkin, who can’t afford Butter to your Cabbage, or Bacon to your Sprouts; You shitten Rogues, who worship the Fundament, because you live by a Turd; who was that sent the Gardener to cut a hundred of Sparragrass, and dug twice in his Wives Parsley-bed before the Goodman came back again? Hold your Tongues, you Knitty Radish-mongers, or I’ll whet my Needle upon mine A s and sow you Lips together.
Pope faced the challenge of talking about this river, with its stinking Fleet Ditch filth and its Billingsgate bawdy, and he found the poetic language he had at his disposal wasn’t up to the job. In fact Pope and his contemporaries were beginning to feel terribly self-conscious about their literary inheritance. Part of it comes from a sense that modernity is no longer compatible with the diction provided by the poetic tradition. We feel the same tension in our own age; the thought of any serious poet writing panegyrics on public figures or celebrating government initiatives in heroic verse makes us giggle uncomfortably. Pope’s age too fretted over the inability of clichés to capture reality, especially pastoral poetry, suffering from a superabundance of clichés—think of Samuel Johnson on Lycidas.
As I said, the Thames didn’t suddenly get dirty in 1715, but poets of earlier generations could turn away from it: their Thames was a Thames in quotation marks, not a real river. You wouldn’t know the “silver Thames,” a phrase I’ve traced back to 1585, could be unpleasant by reading poetry from before 1715 or so. But in Pope’s age, poetic language was being perceived as less appropriate to describe the real river. We’ve seen the tremendous popularity of Denham’s lines, “Though deep, yet clear.” Already by Jonathan Swift’s day, though, they too were easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting. Swift makes the point in one of his less known poems, “Apollo’s Edict,” where he advises the modern poet to avoid the hollow clichés of the poetic tradition:
If ANNA’s happy Reign you praise,
Pray not a word of Halcyon Days.
Nor let my Votaries show their Skill
In apeing lines from Cooper’s Hill;
For know I cannot bear to hear,
The Mimickry of deep yet clear.
The young Pope was guilty of this hollow “mimicry,” and later readers scolded him for it. Joseph Warton, for instance, complained that “A mixture of British and Grecian ideas may justly be deemed a blemish in the Pastorals of Pope: and propriety is certainly violated, when he couples Pactolus with Thames. . . . Complaints of immoderate heat, and wishes to be conveyed to cooling caverns, when uttered by the inhabitants of Greece, have a decorum and consistency, which they totally lose in the character of a British shepherd.”
The pastoral and georgic traditions that had been celebrating rivers for generations were the genres of the countryside, but Pope lived in an increasingly urban world. How was the poet to think about, not a river, but an urban river? How can we talk about the Thames if we’re denied the traditional language of poetry?
The answer seems to lie in a different poetic tradition. In my survey of the poetic Thames and its characteristic genres I neglected to mention one, largely because Pope was central to it. Alongside the pastoral Thames, the georgic Thames, the heroic Thames, and the locodescriptive Thames we have the satirical Thames.
Satirists on the Thames had little ancient tradition to work with, and it’s therefore fitting that the first important satirist of the Thames was in no position to work with the classical tradition. He’s also the poet whose name is most firmly attached to the Thames, though that name is little known today. He’s known to posterity—at least to those few who know him at all—as “Taylor the Water-poet.”
John Taylor worked as a waterman in Southwark in the 1590s and early 1600s, and he knew Ben Jonson; it’s tempting to imagine he ferried Shakespeare and other worthies to and from the Globe. He published travel narratives, royal elegies and epithalamia, religious meditations, verse paraphrases of Scripture, and even nonsense verse, a genre in which he is a pioneer. All the while he kept up his duties on the river, and even managed to secure a few royal gigs, as when he escorted Queen Henrietta Maria out of London to escape the plague of 1625. But when he chose to be satirical, he could be satirical:
I was commanded with the Water Baylie
To see the Rivers clensed both nights and dayly.
Dead Hogges, Dogges, Cats, and well flayd Carryon Horses
Their noysom Corpes soyld the Waters Courses:
Both swines and Stable dunge, Beasts guts and Garbage,
Street durt, with Gardners weeds and Rotten Herbage.
And from those Waters filthy putrifaction,
Our meat and drink were made, which bred Infection.
Dryden was another who turned his satirical attention to the Thames in Mac Flecknoe:
My warbling Lute, the Lute I whilom strung
When to King John of Portugal I sung,
Was but the prelude to that glorious day,
When thou on silver Thames did’st cut thy way. . . .
Echoes from Pissing-Ally, Sh[adwell] call,
And Sh[adwell] they resound from A[ston] Hall.
About thy boat the little Fishes throng,
As at the Morning Toast, that Floats along.
That “Morning Toast” is human and animal waste, an unmissable aspect of the early modern Thames. Pope’s friend John Gay joined in the use of the filthy Thames. In Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London, published in 1716, he combines the conventions of georgic and locodescriptive poetry with his own satirical description of London:
But when the swinging signs your ears offend
With creaking noise, then rainy floods impend;
Soon shall the kennels swell with rapid streams,
And rush in muddy torrents to the Thames.
Another poetic friend of Pope, Jonathan Swift, gave us one of the most geographically precise and memorably revolting description of London’s filth making its way to the Thames:
Now from all parts the swelling kennels flow,
And bear their trophies with them as they go . . .
Sweepings from butchers stalls, dung, guts, and blood,
Drown’d puppies, stinking sprats, all drench’d in mud,
Dead cats and turnip-tops come tumbling down the Flood.
This is the poetic tradition in which Pope’s major works were written after the early Pastorals and Windsor-Forest, and it’s not so much a tradition as a rejection of the previous traditions—a kind of anti-tradition. The most important of these poems is The Rape of the Lock, which includes these famous lines:
Not with more glories, in th’etherial plain,
The Sun first rises o’er the purpled main,
Than issuing forth, the rival of his beams
Lanch’d on the bosom of the silver Thames. (2.1–4)
Belinda’s procession on the Thames is loaded with allusive significance. Critics have catalogued the allusions in this passage, but the function of these allusions is different from in the Pastorals. No longer is Pope using allusion to link his time to poetic tradition; instead, he’s using allusion to point out the gap between his time and the past. The classical allusions are there not because of similarity but because of difference. There has been a rupture with the idealized past.
The Dunciad goes even further in using allusion to create the ironic tension between mode and matter. Here he sets the traditional epic games in Fleet Ditch, where, “with disemboguing streams,”
Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames,
The King of dykes! than whom no sluice of mud
With deeper sable blots the silver flood.
“Here strip, my children! here at once leap in,
“Here prove who best can dash thro’ thick and thin,
“And who the most in love of dirt excel,
“Or dark dexterity of groping well.”
We even get a gruesome frontispiece illustrating Fleet Ditch, with a quotation from book 2: “Here strip my Children! here at once leap in, / Here prove who best can dash thro’ thick and thin.” Pope also returns to the famous lines from Denham, but this time they serve not as a celebration of a river but as an attack on an inferior poet:
Flow, Welsted, flow! like thine inspirer, Beer,
Tho’ stale, not ripe; tho’ thin, yet never clear;
So sweetly mawkish, and so smoothly dull;
Heady, not strong; and foaming tho’ not full.
The epic form and the heroic allusions serve not to link modern Britain with Greece and Rome, but to divide them. The Thames becomes a symbol of what’s unpleasant in the modern world, and not susceptible to conventional celebratory verse.
But Pope managed to preserve a glimpse of that older, traditionally “poetic” Thames; he just couldn’t keep it in London. And this was his favorite Thames. As I confessed at the beginning, part of the attraction of my title, “Pope’s Thames,” was euphony—a pair of monosyllables, each beginning with a plosive, each ending with a labial sliding into a sibilant. Had I been less concerned with sound, I might have called this talk “Alexander Pope and the Thames,” or “The Thames in the Works of Pope,” or some such, thereby avoiding the possessive. But euphony led me to opt for the possessive, and it’s worth thinking about that possessive—to reverse a Popean maxim, the sense will here be an echo to the sound. I’d like to consider what possession would mean in this case—the Thames belonging to Pope.
We find that Thames a few miles to the west of London, in Twickenham. Pope’s villa is remembered for its grotto, the only part to survive the demolition of the buildings, but remember his house faced a parterre that stretched directly down to the river’s edge. It was the scene of his retirement from everything he found offensive about London: as he wrote to his friend Charles Jervas in 1718,
At last, the Gods and Fate have fix’d me on the Borders of the Thames, in the Districts of Richmond and Twickenham. It is here I have pass’d an entire Year of my Life, without any fix’d abode in London, or more than casting a transitory Glance (for a Day or two at most in a Month) on the Pomps of the Town.
In this retreat from “the Pomps of the Town” the London Thames becomes a kind of symbol for political and cultural corruption. It’s easy to figure corruption as pollution—or, to be more historically accurate, it’s easy to figure pollution as corruption, since the English word had moral connotations before it became an environmental term. The “pollution of sin” long predates the pollution of chlorofluorocarbons. And as the London Thames is the site of corruption, the Twickenham Thames is the locus amoenus:
Thou who shalt stop, where Thames’ translucent wave
Shines a broad mirrour through the shadowy cave,
Where lingering drops from mineral roofs distill,
And pointed crystals break the sparkling rill,
Unpolish’d gems no ray on pride bestow,
And latent metals innocently glow:
Approach.
What’s more, his own little stretch of the river allows him to participate, without painful anachronism, in the classical poetic tradition. His retirement to Twickenham lets him participate in the traditions of Horace’s Sabine Farm and Juvenal’s Umbricius; it lets him protect his pastoral language from irony. He had hoped to design an ornament for his boat landing in the form of a swan, with “the statues of two river gods reclined on the bank, . . . with ’Hic placido fluit amne Meles’ on one of their urns [from Politian, “Here the river Meles flows gently”], and ’Magnis ubi flexibus errat Mincius’ on the other [slightly misquoted from Virgil’s third Georgic, “where the broad Mincius wanders”].” It would also be surrounded by “the busts of Homer and Virgil, and higher, two others with those of Marcus Aurelius and Cicero.”
So in his imitation of Horace’s Satire 2.2, written in 1734, he can engage in the same poetic conventions that marked his career thirty years earlier, without worrying that he’s engaging in what Warton dismissed as “trite repetitions of classical images,” because the images have been revivified, at once traditional and authentic:
Content with little, I can piddle here
On brocoli and mutton, round the year;
But ancient friends (tho’ poor, or out of play)
That touch my bell, I cannot turn away.
’Tis true, no Turbots dignify my boards,
But gudgeons, flounders, what my Thames affords. (137–42)
“My Thames”—Pope’s Thames—is at once ancient and modern, Horatian and Popean. It’s at once the avenue connecting him to London and the symbol of his retreat from it.
In this talk I haven’t proposed any radical new way of looking at Pope’s poetry or his career; in fact I’m telling a pretty conventional story about Pope’s progress and withdrawal from London to his rustic villa. What interests me, though, is that it’s possible to tell the usual story of Pope’s Virgilian cursus simply by looking at the Thames, because Pope’s entire poetic career is reflected in its waters. He’s constantly engaged with the poetic associations of the river, and it features prominently in all the stages of his poetic life, though in shifting ways. Much of Pope’s poetry, including most of his most famous poetry, deserves to be styled river poetry—even that his career deserves to be called a river career. It may not be too much to say that at the heart of Pope’s poetry is Pope’s Thames.