Atherstone Essay

— The Corvey Poets Project at the University of Nebraska —

British Poetry of the later Eighteenth and Earlier Nineteenth Centuries

Bibliographical and Contextual Apparatus

Atherstone, Edwin.

A Midsummer Day's Dream. A Poem. London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1824. Pp. 173.

Descriptive Essay

In 1824, Edwin Atherstone published A Midsummer Day's Dream, which follows the narrator's experience on a midsummer morning and his subsequent dream that afternoon. The poem is carefully chronological and extremely detailed, beginning with the narrator's sleepless night, following him through his morning exercise and meal before describing the environment in which he falls asleep and finally ending with his abrupt awakening following a vivid dream that afternoon.

The poem begins with a fairly lengthy introduction, although the author does not name it as such. This introductory section leading up to the dream vividly describes the narrator's wonderful experience with nature on a midsummer's day. His focus is primarily on the sun, because midsummer's day is the longest day of the year and the sun is at its greatest strength. Many of his observations involve a relationship between the sun and various aspects of nature:

Thus long I lay 'mid all delightful sights,
All lovely sounds: the sun and shade-tinged fields:
The gently quivering leaves; the flower-fill'd hedges;
The hills and vales; the blue immense of sky;
The songs of birds; the softly whispering wind,
As it brush'd lightly o'er the bowing grass;
The far off sighings of the languid waves
Fainting away on the warm sands; the scent
Of the new hay, of clover, and sweet herbs,—
Wild roses honeysuckles, eglantines,
All breathing out their sweet souls to the sun.

The narrator also encourages his readers to enjoy the beauty of nature no matter the season or weather. Nature, he says, is always lovely but is awe-inspiring and magnificent even in the midst of a tempest. He urges his audience to rise early, exercise well, eat lightly, and go to bed early because nature will reward this kind of living with health and satisfaction. Strangely enough, the narrator does not follow his own advice and spends the afternoon sleeping in the sun.

The prominence of the sun continues throughout the dream, where an ethereal being appears to the narrator, informing him that he will be given the opportunity to view the universe with the eyes of a spirit. The being has many features that remind the narrator of the sun and he soon learns that the being is indeed one of the spirits who inhabit the sun. The majority of the poem consists of the dream which is filled with very remarkable, if rather unbelievable, episodes taking the narrator from the North Pole to the bottom of the ocean, through the center of the earth and to the outer reaches of space with his guide. He is told of a civilization destroyed when a comet collided with earth and he visits the sun which, like earth and the rest of the universe, turns out to be inhabited by ethereal beings like his guide:

At these words
Methought I started up and saw—Oh heavens!
What words can tell the infinite delight
Of that fine vision! All the hills and vales
Teem'd with celestial shapes: the skies and waters
Were thronged with them. Some rode upon the sea,
And, where they touch'd , the waves grew suddenly bright…

As his guide takes him first to the North Pole and then to the bottom of the ocean, the narrator learns that these eternal beings give Nature the beauty mortals are able to see and more that they cannot see. Once they have reached the ocean floor, the spirit guide shows the narrator a ruined city and tells him of its demise; a massive comet that hit the earth, killing all living things and rearranging the land and seas. The guide describes how the comet grew larger and brighter until it outshone the sun:

'Yet once more
It rose on earthly eyes. One-fourth the heavens
Was cover'd by its bulk. Ere it had reach'd
Its middle course, the huge ball almost fill'd
The sky's circumference,—and anon there was
No sky!—nought but that terrible world of fire
Glaring, —and roaring,—and advancing still!
'Men saw not this:—th' insufferable heat
Had slain all things that lived. The grass and herbs
First died:—the interminable forests next
Burst into flames:—down to their uttermost deeps
The oceans boil'd,—spurting their bubbling waves,—
Rocking and wallowing higher than the hills:—
The hills themselves at last grew burning red;
And the whole earth seem'd as 'twould melt away.
'Intensest expectation now held all
The ethereal natures silent. From the heights
Of space they look'd, and waited for the shock;
For in right opposite courses the two orbs
Rush'd tow'rds each other, as two enemies haste
To meet in deadly combat. 'Twas a sight
Sublime, yet sad, to see this beautiful earth,—
Stript of all verdure, empty of all life,—
Glowing beneath the comet's terrible breath,
Like a huge coal of fire!
'They now drew nigh:
Rapidly rolling on they came!—They struck!—
The universe felt the shock. We look'd to have seen
The earth shatter'd to dust, or borne away
By that tremendous fire-star; but they touch'd
Obliquely,—and glanced off. The comet soon
Shot swiftly on again:—the weaker earth,—
Jarr'd from her orbit,—stood awhile,—turning
Backward upon her axis,—vibrating
Down to her very centre;—then went on
Faltering,—swinging heavily to and fro
Upon her alter'd poles.
'Such was the shock,
Hills started from their roots, and flew away
Leagues through the air:—islands and deep-fix'd rocks
Leap'd from the sea, and on the continents
Became new mountains:—continents were rent
Asunder; and the boiling seas rush'd in.
And made of them new islands:—all the waters
That round the earth rose upward, and rush'd on
Toward the new equator. Then the hills
Were overflow'd;—the highest mountain tops,
Still peeping o'er the flood, became sea rocks
And islands;—and the bed of the old deeps
Was left dry land.'

The excerpt above and the larger passage containing the entire comet event bring the reader back to the sun. The comet competes with the sun and eventually outshines it, but the sun remains constant and eventually "returns". This is one of the longest and most memorable events in the poem and was frequently referred to in reviews of the poem. The narrator and his guide continue their tour of the universe by going through the center of the earth and then to the sun itself.

On the sun, the ethereal beings have a civilization of their own, superior to any on earth. Since the sun is very prominent throughout the poem, a great deal of time is spent observing the many beautiful landscapes present and the narrator discovers that, like earth, the light on the sun changes with the time of day, but unlike earth it changes colors:

This mighty orb about, takes, hour by hour,
As here we measure hours, a varying hue,
Thou saw'st in entering its bright noon; the comes
A ruby tint, that all this ether turns
To its own colour; next, with soft gradation,
All deep and golden hues that thou hast seen
In the rich topaz, that beneath your earth
The sun's ray hath created, with all gems
And glittering metals: imperceptibly
Then steal upon our firmament all shades
Of the pure emerald; they, dying change
To sapphire hues; and, last, this violet tinge,
Which thou dost see so beautiful and pure,
Comes with slow step upon us: then 'tis night.

After contemplating the virtues of the sun, the narrator is taken to the outer reaches of the universe, past numerous stars and systems to the realm of death and night. Here, the spirit guide talks to the narrator, describing to him the vastness of the universe and the fate of stars whose elements disperse and form new stars. The spirit relates to the narrator the slow decay of a particular star and then they return home where the narrator awakens and sees his own sun, just as it is setting.

While Atherstone's ideas and imagination are great, the scope of the poem is perhaps too vast and unimaginable for words, making it difficult for readers to stay engaged. However, he saves himself somewhat by his great skill with detail and description of nature and to a lesser degree, the sublime situations on which he is permitted to gaze. Atherstone is quite capable of turning language into poetry as is seen in his description of the rising sun:

The cope of heaven was clear and deeply blue,
And not a cloud was visible. Towards the east
An atmosphere of golden light, that grew
Momently brighter, and intensely bright,
Proclaim'd the approaching sun. Now—now he comes:—
A dazzling point emerges from the sea;
It spreads;—it rises:—now it seems a dome
Of burning gold:—higher and rounder now
It mounts-it swells:—now like a huge balloon
Of light and fire, it rests upon the rim
Of waters; lingers there a moment;—then—
Soars up.—

It comes as no surprise that the poem was relatively well-received by critics of the time for the beauty of language, for Atherstone shows great skill capturing nature, however, it is also no surprise that the poem has fallen into obscurity for its lack of originality and purpose.