Writing under the initials B. V., James Thomson imagined a vast dark city where sleepless wanderers walk without faith or hope. The poem moves between a narrator’s visions and the voices he hears: a preacher who announces there is no God, mourners in a cathedral, and at last the brooding figure of Melancholia set above the city.
The bleakest long poem of the Victorian age, admired by readers of Poe, Baudelaire and Eliot. Download the free EPUB.