Today’s Poem: The Opium-Smoker

This soul at pawn and this delirious heart

Vasily Vereshchagin, The Opium Eaters, 1868 (Wikimedia Commons)

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The Opium‑Smoker

by Arthur Symons

I am engulfed, and drown deliciously.
Soft music like a perfume, and sweet light
Golden with audible odours exquisite,
Swathe me with cerements for eternity.         ◦ cerements = burial cloths
Time is no more. I pause and yet I flee.
A million ages wrap me round with night.
I drain a million ages of delight.
I hold the future in my memory.

Also I have this garret which I rent,
This bed of straw, and this that was a chair,
This worn-out body like a tattered tent,
This crust, of which the rats have eaten part,
This pipe of opium; rage, remorse, despair;
This soul at pawn and this delirious heart.
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There are plenty of modern pop songs that rail about drugs, but 19th-century literature had its own share of drug writing — from Thomas De Quincey’s fame-making 1822 Confessions of An English Opium-Eater to Oscar Wilde’s 1890 Picture of Dorian Gray, which describes London’s horrifying opium dens “where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new.”

The Brontë sisters’ brother Branwell was a laudanum addict. (The character of Lord Lowborough in Anne Brontë’s 1848 The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is probably based on him.) Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among many others, took the drug. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s wife — Elizabeth Siddal, the supermodel of the Pre-Raphaelites — died of a laudanum overdose in 1862.

As for poems about or influenced by drugs, there’s Coleridge’s 1803 “The Pains of Sleep,” maybe. Tennyson’s 1832 “The Lotos-eaters.” Siddal’s 1855 “A Year and a Day.” And Today’s Poem, “The Opium-Smoker,” by Arthur Symons (1865–1945).

Symons occupies a curious place in English literature: a decadent who lived until the 1940s, a poet and playwright who regularly published in The Yellow Book and other fin-de-siècle magazines. He was also the author of The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), one of the most influential book of literary criticism ever published — introducing the likes of William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot to a new range of French poets: Arthur Rimbaud, Jules Laforgue, Stéphane Mallarmé, and all the rest who seemed to English readers the very definition of a new poetry.

An 1898 portrait of Arthur Symons (Wikimedia Commons)

Along the way, Symons published his own poetry, and several of his best-known early poems were sonnets: “The Absinthe Drinker,” “Nerves,” “Idealism.” And “The Opium-Smoker,” an 1889 Petrarchan sonnet, rhymed abba-abba cdc-ede.

It’s also a fine use of the volta, the turn from the octave (the first eight lines of a sonnet) to the sestet (the final six lines). In the opening, Symons pictures the opium smoker as a kind of living Egyptian mummy, subjectively swathed in a timeless night. The language is dreamy and vast — formed by sensory confusion, a hallucinatory synesthesia in which colors are heard and music sensed by smell.

And then, in the brutal sestet, Symons describes the objective reality of opium addiction: “Also I have this garret which I rent, . . . / This crust, of which the rats have eaten part” — and more: “This soul at pawn and this delirious heart.”

Elizabeth Siddal as model for John Everett Millais’s Opheila, 1851–52 (Wikimedia Commons)

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