Expectations of Darkness: The “Blind Poet” P. B. Marston

If Philip Bourke Marston (1850–1887) is remembered at all today, he is remembered as a “blind poet,” a protégé of Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the later Pre-Raphaelite movement.¹ This essay demonstrates that in his first volume of poetry, published in 1871, Marston actually fought to establish a poetic identity for himself that was distinct from his visual impairment. A consideration of the nineteenth-century pressures to “pass” as able-bodied or to “perform” his disability, pressures that I show to be compounded by Victorian ideals of post-Romantic poetic identity, demonstrates Marston’s engagement with contemporary debates over the role and remit of the poet. Disability studies provides a framework in which to reconsider the value of Marston’s work, revealing the original and interesting ways in which he sought to undermine the accepted norms of nineteenth-century lyric poetry. His depictions of sense experience fulfill the “fleshly” ideals of Pre-Raphaelitism in a way that the “painterly poems” of his contemporaries often failed to do. Marston inverts the typical hierarchy of the senses to challenge what David Bolt has termed “ocularnormativism”: “the perpetuation of the conclusion that the supreme means of perception is necessarily visual.”² Marston’s poetry suggests that an overreliance on the visual limits the ways in which poets engage with the natural world. In doing so, he subverts many of the clichés of lyric poetry that the Pre-Raphaelite movement inherited from the Romantics.

A consideration of the critical reception of Marston over the course of his sixteen-year career demonstrates the difficulties he faced in establishing a poetic identity for himself independent from his visual disability. Marston’s first volume of verse, Song-Tide (1871), published when he was just twenty-one years old, was praised as being “exceptionally worth notice”³ and having “un-doubted poetic and literary value,”⁴ and in it, “it would be difficult to point out a single imperfection of form.”⁵ Of particular interest, however, is the fact that the volume was regularly praised for its “abundance of imagery,”⁶ with one critic writing, “The songs are pervaded by a tender melancholy swept by gusts of memory, which are caught and portrayed with a skill so sure and exquisite that we sometimes forget the grief while gazing on the beautiful features of a fair face, or on the suddenly presented glory of a summer landscape” (“Poems of Philip Bourke Marston,” pp. 117–118).⁷ None of the reviews directly mentions Marston’s nearly lifelong blindness.

As the New Monthly Magazine noted, visual imagery and the kind of preeminence of sight among the senses favored by Marston’s Pre-Raphaelite contemporaries appears throughout his first volume. The sonnet “A Lake” typifies this kind of poetry:

Thy great calm beauty can reflect the sun; The stars are mirrored in thee, and the moon Beholds her image in thy waveless flow, So cold, and yet so fair to look upon; So cold that, even in love’s hottest noon, Thy depths untroubled are more cold than snow.⁸

Coming early in the volume (it is the fifth sonnet), this poem would seem to uphold the importance of imagery in Marston’s poetry. The preponderance of reflections in these lines—of the sun, the stars, and the moon—multiply the images found in the poem, enacting an almost visual overload as the mind’s eye moves between them. The verbs that Marston employs make explicit the focus on the act of seeing: “reflect,” “mirror,” behold,” “look.” Like many of the visual descriptions found in Pre-Raphaelite verse, the lake described here is static: it is “placid,” “silent,” “tranquil,” “smooth,” and “untroubled.” It is a picture, a painting, rather than a living scene of nature.

Despite the initial praise lavished on Marston’s skillful use of imagery in 1871, later critics reacted far differently. Over the course of the next decade, the fact of Marston’s blindness became more widely known. In consequence, it soon became the focus of considerations of his poetry; by the time of his death, he was well known...