Though little known in light of his canonical contemporaries, which included Robert Browning and Matthew Arnold, Loren Fitzgerald Almsley (1821-1864) wrote subtle, quietly beautiful poems, counterbalancing the urge for fame in his youth with acquiescence to a life of observation in middle age. Claimed young, at 43, by pulmonary tuberculosis, like so many of his generation, Almsley expressed the following hope shortly before his death: “To have revealed, if only to my own condescension, the worth of the play of shade from a twig in the sun.” He often ends his work on just such a note, returning his poems to the realm of the physical with a detail of his setting.
Almsley’s sonnet cycle “Colossi,” however, composed at 20 years old, completely contradicts his reputed reserve. It attests to several of his literary influences and his fierce desire to become like them: “Rabelais and La Fontaine have left for me/ a mountain; my flesh demands its coldest heights,/ Voyages sole on Coleridge’s endless sea/ ‘midst titans glimpsed in flashes through the nights.”
Imagine the tall, young Almsley, surrounded by copies of Molière and the French classicists in the original—his father worked as a contract lawyer, but one with intense artistic interests, and he taught his son both Latin and Greek before the age of fourteen; Almsley managed French on his own—working in the small hours of the morning with a thunderstorm raging outside his window, and the sudden illumination of lightning.
Almsley debated turning to the priesthood following a failed relationship in his mid-twenties, which he spent between Paris and London. The woman may have been the wife of his friend Sidney Fisher; Almsley fell completely in love with her, though her affection for him did not last or proved impossible to sustain: “My life-long search, drawn out, remains unended/ Gullible, I sob—O shamefully done,/And bitterly rebuke myself, for scant appended/ is my trembling hopeful leap— for you, unwon./ Though joy defies all bounds I shall demean its scope/ And lustful hopes I execute for treason/ By thought men live; mistrustfully I cope/ I disappear at table, still with reason.”
The poem is “A Forlorn and Final Look Out,” written in 1847. Almsley appears to renounce his emotions for the sake of greater certainty, while lamenting at the same time the deadened state he will be forced to live in: “still with reason” could refer to an excuse for why he does not talk at dinner, or to an inner stillness from a pragmatic lack of passion.
Almsley returned to England after enduring a period of poverty in Paris, unable to find consistent work as a translator as he had hoped. He taught Greek, briefly, until a diplomatic official named Raymond Longley, a friend and distant relative of the Almsley family, obtained a post for him as a clerk in Florence. Almsley moved to Italy in 1850, and lived out the rest of his life there, developing his enduring love of Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch. He wrote the following, a unique interpretation of “terza rima,” after visiting Venice and walking in the spectacular Piazza San Marco: “Striding magnificent polyphony/ I walk among white columns and arcades/ Pointed arches, angels in epiphany./ I turn, one of many, and I am bound/ by the basilica, and the idolatry/ When over the cathedral the bells sound./ Out they ring above the painted domes/ leaving crosses and crossed stone where found/ Out unto the stacked and slanting homes./ Above canals where ancient bridges span/ The bells toll and pass as golden combs/ did through the hair of a courtesan/ Arrayed gold as well; and from the stage/ Orfeo sang, the lapping waters ran/ a gilded Phoenix rose to meet its age!/ But I in middle courtyard find it fades/ The stone above, below a better page/ than dust; Venice rather than its shades.”
“In Venice” also seems to betray a curious renunciation of fantasy or emotion: Almsley forces himself to ignore Orpheus, also the title of an opera staged at the “Fenice” (Phoenix) theater in Venice, and the Romantic imagery of the city for the more concrete, but still astounding, architecture.
Almsley died in Florence following an ineffective surgical operation. He never married. Other than the three excerpted above, only a handful of his poems remain, and can only be found with difficulty; these three, however, will be in any sufficiently large anthology of nineteenth century English poetry. While typically Romantic, Almsley seems less boring and overdramatic than the period stereotype predicts: his epitaph, supposedly dictated from his deathbed, confirms his sense of perspective and balance: “Here lies an English poet who regrets/ That so little time remains to him for study.”
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