Arthur Hallam’s Remains Are Delivered By Boat

Arthur Hallam climbed out of the casket. He drifted like a bubble through the open door, through the scent of freshly tanned leather and whale-oil and tar, and paused by the railing, watching the sea chase itself around the moon. The bleary waves slushed against the sides of the boat and somewhere behind him, a sail rippled in the darkness. The phantom giddiness of his perception hardened into rusted metal beneath his fingers. Though chilled by death, he still shivered in the wind.

The wake-rippled calligraphy breathed a mist into the dead man’s reaching palm. Nothing existed save the frore wind at his back and the crack of the mast. The breeze blew harder, carrying the smell of rain, wet, and thunder. A storm off of starboard scumbled the horizon, and electricity danced in its distant canyons of sky.

By the cabin, a fur coat drooped above a pair of gumboots, and Arthur shivered into it.

In words like weeds I’ll wrap me o’er.

He couldn’t tell whether the voice came from within or without.

He ran his hand along a tightened coil: “Rope!” he said and shook the sea-dew from the twine. Beneath the flapping flag of the aftmost strut, he paused in thought: “Mizzenmast!”

Timber groaned and the ship yawed in the swell. Arthur drifted mid-ship to where the rigging hung in webs around the crow’s nest, and imagined what it must be like to be up there, exposed like a lightning rod to the vectors of night. “Alone,” he said.

And then he said “forebitt.”

And then “jibboom.”

“Bollocks,” cried another voice.

Two sailors leaned against a crate, a lantern between them.

“I knew it warn’t all sea shanties and rum.”

“Wasn’t such a season,” said the other, “since Grandpa Eddie rode the tea line in 75.”

“I coulda been a vegetable peddler,” said the first, “or rag and bone man.” “But I was beguiled by tattoos. What’s it earned me? A watery grave.”

“Come, my gramps would have joked such a deluge to shame. Take all the piss of the rain, he would.”

“Ay, and did his laughter keep him afloat?”

“Kept his spirits light to the uttermost.” The shadow drew on its cigar and continued: “His spirits were so light they even floated his corpse. It washed up at Falmouth.”

“Bloody hell.”

“Wouldn’t be surprised if he homed in bloody hell, indeed. Spent his life raising it.”

The fearful one, silent, shuddered at the curtain that advanced from the east. His companion puffed again and continued: “I never met him, of course. But I must have read those letters a hundred times. We keep them in a tobacco box high on a shelf next to the commemorative plate.”

#

In early September 1833, Mary and Matilda Tennyson, strolling through the lanes of Somersby, spotted a tall figure ahead of them sheeted in white and seeming to glide across the ground. They followed the figure around corners and through stiles until, in plain view of the astonished sisters, it disappeared into a hedge. The leaves hung still and the berries were bright, unshaken on the branch. The women hastened homeward, and once arrived, the over-awed Matilda had a crying fit. Much later, Emily, the third sister, would recall the event and link it to the death of Arthur Hallam, her then-betrothed, who was then on the continent and unaware that he had two weeks to live. She wrote about it in her diary. The year was 1869.

#

An overpowering shyness prevented Arthur from presenting himself to the mariners. He’d wait until the night was quiet save for the creaking in the rigging, before heaving to the casket lid. After he’d drunk his fill of moonlight and seaspray, he’d glide back to his hold and lay himself meekly on his metal pillow. Then while the sun ascended and the seamen held fast, he’d drift through rudderless images.

One evening, an iron bell reminded him that he was a poet.

The mariners, lantern-shadowed, scrambled over planks already slick with the rain; they bustled about ropes and issued in and out of holds. Arthur knew that the bell had summoned him for some purpose, so he lent his hands to the rope to heft up the anchor. But the massed seamen rippling like a single muscle straining against the heave shouldered him aside.

“Rail,” he said, hoisting himself up. “Cool rail.”

The water churned in the distance where the edge of the storm advanced, and swells rippled out from the epicenter.

“Ship,” he said, “sad ship.”

The bell re-tolled.

My words are only words, and move

Upon the topmost froth of thought.

While the sailors labored in the rigging, Arthur ran to the captain’s chamber, seeking out paper and pen.

He rousted an old log book from a shelf by the binnacle and readied the quill. In a blank corner cribbed about by latitudes, he wrote the word “froth.” Then he crossed it out and wrote “Emily.” Then he penned the first lines of “Hickory Dickory Dock.”

#

The letter came from three days ago. Written at Bristol, it had disembarked by post and arrived at Spilsby on October 3. It was claimed by Matilda, who delivered it to Alfred. The former, not guessing the contents, went out for a walk. When she returned, her brother was pale, having taken, in the meantime, their sister Emily aside the letter unsealed. Then he left the two sisters in the parlor. Outside, a beech glittered in the cold.

She’d remember that tree thirty years later.

#

Arthur Hallam didn’t know who he was or where he came from — all he knew was that he was alive.

Nights he leaned against the casket, using its lid as a desk. On the pages he’d pilfered, he wrote an endless stream of jangles, rhymes, apophthegms, and tags.

He’d taken, when waters were still between storms, to leaning on the taffrail and whispering his verses. To the barnacles that clung to the wood, he’d sing, and to the fish that rose, Orpheus-entranced, to flip their pale bellies in the moonshine, he’d speak softly of love.

One evening he even climbed up to the crow’s nest. He shared it with a seabird that, putting aside its usual fear, held tight to its perch and cawed in his face.

The moon and its double, transpiercing the horizon—a waffling smudge that only showed the seam between one dark and the next—gazed at each other through the needle light they’d sewn through dusk. Arthur Hallam unwrinkled his pages against the ropes and spoke them out to the silence.

‘Tis better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all.

Emboldened, he moved on to journeyman’s work:

He called for his pipe, and he called for his bowl

And he called for his fiddlers three.

While the twin moons, one misted with rain, blinked their watery eyes, he read out his latest:

Below the swollen arachnoid tunic was collected a gray serum that had condensed into the appearance of gelatine.

He returned to his chamber.

#

On September 15th, 1833, Henry Hallam folded over his newspaper by the fire. His son lay napping on the settee, book in his lap. The trip abroad had been salubrious overall: Arthur seemed to be gaining strength by the day. To one his age, separation from the beloved could only be a gain, and Henry had been proud to see in his son a steadfast commitment to the matrimonial life that awaited on return from the continent.

As a historian, Henry took pride in his impartiality, and he knew just how many promising youths, by being ill-led, had been wracked on the corals of youth: he hoped to see his son clear beyond their encroachment, and though he might, as all fathers, be fond, he trusted he had enough objective justification to surmise that the day was not far when he might see his child, eminent in his own right, shine not only with reflected glory, but burn brightly on his own.

Henry Hallam laid the newspaper aside and looked lovingly at the sleeper. He stood and, as he’d done years ago, gently brushed the hair from his son’s sleeping face.

The eyes didn’t open and the forehead was cold.

#

After braving the storm, the ship put in at La Goulette. For a week they waited for the winds to change and the currents to disperse. Arthur smuggled himself in a skiff. While the longshoremen passed and repassed a tankard of rum, he sat at the rudder and watched the old Spanish forts reflected in the canal.

When they put in at Tunis just outside the medina, he almost wept to feel the warm sand beneath his feet. The stones sparkled in a vast scoop of beach all along the bay. He hefted one in his palm, savoring the warmth and brought its smooth roughness to his cheek. The muezzins from their towers roused him from one enchantment to another. He passed by olive trees and many-splendored domes. Jews clustered in gaily colored vests, light-haired Berbers, French soldiers, and red-capped Spanish Moors. The barefooted merchants sat cross-legged behind their aromatic wares, pitching rich piles of nutmeg, cloves, verdigris, and saffron. By their salvers of sun-ripened dates or vials of sweet rose oil, they haggled with the passersby. Arthur ran his fingers along the flowered dimity and muslin. Through the narrow alleys, between flat-roofed houses, camels carried charcoal and coffee; on the lofty citadel crowning the town, the official palaces upheld themselves on marble quarried from the ruins of antiquity.

Days passed and Arthur slept in a tent abandoned at the corner of the bazaar or in the mosaiced portals of the baths. In this alien present the past wore away, and the future, if he imagined it, was everlasting sun on a mosque; spacious, shaded cloisters traced with stuccoed arabesque; the flamingoes that scatter before the prow of ships laden with almonds, liquorice, and honey; and the handkerchiefs waved as the ships set out to sea.

He’d concealed within a satchel some of his poems: during the days, still spring-fresh in winter, he posted them along the colonnades, or between chinks in the cobblestone, or on the doors to the tanneries.

One afternoon, he carried his work into a palace. A woman stood by a traceried window, a child canted on her hip. A breeze trembled the printed curtains, and when she turned he thought he recognized the face of someone who’d been waiting, so he pulled from his satchel the only poem left. He coughed nervously and read it aloud:

All efforts to rouse him were in vain. Arthur Hallam was dead at the age of twenty-two.

The woman wafted a fly from her temple. She crinkled up her brown face.

Two days later they left Carthage behind.

#

Arthur Hallam, issued again like outdated currency, stood on the deck of the King David and wondered why it should be so.

The captain stumped up and down barking commands while an Italian cabin boy loudly called on the Lady of Sorrow. Another storm.

It was all coming back in pieces.

At the Protestant cemetery in Rome, Tennyson’s dear friend had lain flowers on the grave of Keats.

The mariners furled the sails and battened down the last hatch, and life made itself as small as possible. Two sailors passed to re-tamp heavy cargo, carrying rope, hammers, and nails.

En route to a vacant tomb.

Two dripping mariners, faces slack not with religious awe but with horror, would raise hammers like cudgels before a narrow box of lead. Its unseated lid would open sacrilegiously around empty as lightning slashed the sky.

For what purpose show his face once more to the sun? He’d be ashamed to appear before her. Saltwater spume tickled grotesquely across his bare arms. The wind, howling from the center of the storm, cried great nothings in his ear. A giddiness ascended to him from the wave.

Like a vanishing rat, he dashed through the spray. Just as the duo passed by with their hammers, he slotted himself back into the casket

Surely he’d woken too soon and an angel would attend.

He closed his eyes, feeling as he’d done years ago when, a fainting fit upon him, he’d turned from his book.

#

Alfred Tennyson sat at his desk. The rest of the house was asleep. During the day, he and Emily had passed each other like twin ghosts, each equally insubstantial. Oppressed by the grieved silence of his room, he’d spent the evening over cards at the White Fox. Returned home, he’d taken off his jacket and hung his hat on a peg. He’d paused by a wardrobe to rearrange some flowers. In his chambers, he’d straightened a picture gone askew and stood back appraising. Then Alfred Tennyson had sat at his desk.

The rest of the house was asleep when he started to write.

He imagined the ship with its mournful freight disembarking from Trieste. He imagined the sailors straining to right the storm-slanted mast. He imagined himself standing on a gray pier in the dismal dawn—until a man he recognizes takes him by the arm and leads him into a tavern. They talk about the journey while the horses stamp and clatter over flags in the courtyard. With a fleet scoop they collect time’s scattered jacks: he and Arthur together once more.

His pen makes it so.

And if along with these should come

The man I held as half-divine;

Should strike a sudden hand in mine,

And ask a thousand things of home;

And I should tell him of my pain,

And how my life had drooped of late,

And he should sorrow o’er my state

And marvel what possessed my brain…

Well, what then?

And I perceived no touch of change,

No hint of death in all his frame,

But found him all in all the same,

I should not feel it to be strange.

Alfred snuffed the light and his music followed him into his dream.

#

I should not feel it to be strange.

Arthur Hallam set the pen aside.

So that’s what it was. A disease in images. What kind of afterlife was this?

The ship had long since left Africa behind and mid-ocean was cold as a marble. Sometimes in the night a snowfall would settle and the mariners would wake to find their rigging laced with powder. One day as cold and dreary as the next must have been Christmas, for the captain produced a bowl of spiced rum. An old man summoned a fiddle and as the sun sank pink and pearly the weathered boards resounded.

The more Arthur wrote, the clearer it all became. He’d even taken to writing in the casket itself. When he finished a page, he’d tuck it underneath for padding, feathering his grave with spent leaves. There, in his nest, he reviewed his latest composition.

I should not feel it to be strange.

He grieved for his friend’s grief as he grieved for himself. He gathered his loose papers and late one night, when the sea was the color of ink, he scattered them overboard.

Returning, he lifted the little iron box he’d been using as a pillow, pried off the lid and peeked inside. Then he smiled. He snapped the cover back in place and slid into the coffin.

He blocked out the light and laid his head upon his heart.

#

Since his death in 1833, Arthur Hallam has vanished less than most. A basic search turns up several thousand references. Among the articles and monographs one finds treatments of his relationship with Emily (sonnets, sons, love), his poetic canonization (Catholicism, collective memory, love), the Victorian compromise (symbolist poetry, Christianity, love), and his death (sons, love, fluids). His Remains in Verse and Prose were privately published in 1834. After In Memoriam resurrected Hallam in Victorian consciousness in 1850, the remains were released on a more robust scale so that a wider public could satisfy its curiosity about the man their laureate had described as “half-divine.” Later, in 1943, Hallam’s chief compositions in poetry and prose appeared under the banner of the Oxford University Press. All of Hallam’s family and personal acquaintances being long since deceased, T.H. Motter felt at liberty to publish pieces that were suppressed for reasons that to us seem particularly slight. On Archive.org, each of these volumes claims at least a couple hundred views, showing that Hallam, if he cannot reach the heights of a William Morris, can at least hold his own with Clough. Most references to Arthur are, of course, references to Alfred: one can read the “jeune homme fatal’s” laudatory essay on Tennyson’s 1830 collection; peruse his letters to Tennyson; and, of course, explore his influence on Tennyson’s poems. Under this last category, one can learn of Hallam’s contribution to Tennyson’s “poetic exhibitionism” and “economics of mourning,” as well as contemplate the “aestheticist allegory of a counter-public sphere.” To the young man from Eton, such a twinned fate might not seem unfitting: he and Alfred had planned on a joint volume, after all, following the example of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and would have published had Arthur’s father, Henry, not balked at the exposure.

Arthur bore the disappointment, while living, with a stiff upper lip.

How much more so when dead!

#

The cliffs of Dover, white and cold, stood imperiously against the rush of sea. A few birds swooped silently down, footed gray stone, and bathed their frozen wings.

The deck was alive with men crossing to and fro.

Could he in a fancy make the fancy come true? The rail was cold and hard; a dragged chain cried out against the deck; waves heaved up the scent of seaweed and brine.

He could walk forth like Lazarus. As the first flakes started to fall on this wan December day, he could take his friend by the arm and lead him to a tavern. They would talk about the journey while the horses stamped and clattered over flags in the courtyard. With a fleet scoop they’d collect time’s scattered jacks: he and Alfred together once more.

Then he’d escort Emily to where a beech glittered in the cold. She’d say she thought he’d never return. He’d laugh as at an old story. She’d remember that tree thirty years later.

Returned home, he’d lay back napping on the settee, book in his lap, while Henry Hallam folded over his newspaper by the fire. Henry would lay the newspaper aside and look lovingly at the dreamer. He’d stand and, as he’d done years ago, brush the hair from his son’s sleeping face.

Arthur would grow old, as his dear poet had imagined, the two of them jesting, plucking neighboring apples from the branch.

Thrice blest whose lives are faithful prayers

Whose loves in higher love endure.

The words were his own, his death their immortality — or was it the other way around?

“Dust and ashes,” he cried. “Poets, too, he takes. Forgive me.” He said it to the cliffs of England, hardening in the mist, and to those he left behind, and to the timber, and the wave. He said it to the crates of oranges, and spices, and silks, and to Humpty Dumpty, for whose rhyme he’d never found a satisfactory conclusion, no matter the labor expended. He said it to Rev. Hartley at Eton and Rev. Whewell at Cambridge, and to Dante and Shakespeare, and to his sister Ellen, dead at sixteen. He said it to Matilda, whom he’d somehow managed to scare in a sheet, and to Karl von Rokitansky, conductor of the autopsy. He said it to the Viennese, who, to extort money from his corpse, had shunted it back and forth between various bureaucracies, forcing his grieved father to chase it like a dog catcher across the Maria Therasanplatz.

He hung the fur coat over the gumboots.

Then he returned to his hold with its tanned leather and whale oil and tar—they’d placed him there because of their fear of the smell—and hefted the lid.

Angels and academics rejoiced.