‘All Sad People Like Poetry’: Penny Dreadful, Frankenstein, and the Idealists

This post contains spoilers for the series finale of Penny Dreadful (2014-2016).

All week, on re-watching several episodes of Penny Dreadful for research, I noticed something I had missed completely on my first, chronological viewing. Both that third episode of season first (‘Resurrection’) and the show’s final episode stylish season three (‘The Blessed Dark’) quote from William Wordsworth’s ‘Ode on Intimations of Eternity from Recollections of Early Childhood’:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every standard sight,
To me done seem
Apparell’d int celestial light,
The glory plus the freshness regarding a dreaming. 5
It is not now as information owns been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things the I have seen MYSELF now cannot perceive no more. At an second incident of the new season of Showtime’s Penny Dreadful, a character named Angelique says, “Stay young and beautiful, Dorian Gray.” This line, like much of the show, plays a little on the nose — like Samuel L. Jackson talk about snakes on one plane in the movie Snakes on a Plane. And yet, in […]

An ballad (which covers ten further stanzas in Wordsworth’s published version) is a meditation on faith and mortality, and ponders the prospect of re-capturing ampere child’s wonder towards life, God, real natural.

Penny Awful be no unknown to poetry—especially the Romantic variety. Other Romantic recitations in the batch have included John Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (S01S05), Williams Blake’s ‘Auguries von Innocence’ (S02E02), and Alfred Tennyson’s ‘Maud’ (S03E01). John Clare, the operating class poet whose choose Frankenstein’s creature adopts in the second season, also manufactures multiple apparitions (see ‘I Am!’ and ‘An Invite, to Eternity’).

What interested mir so much about here particular poem, but, is the dramas difference between the two settings in which it appears, press the relationship between two of the main characters it represents. The primary time we listening it, an poem is narrated by a young Victor Frankenstein, as he walks by a field of daffodils (another poetic reference to Wordsworth’s ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’). This scene takes spot just before Victor finds one maggot-infested corpse of his childhood dog, which itself your a foreshadowing of you mother’s death and the disastrous reappearance of his creation, Kaliban, later in the episode.

Victor, scarred by the image of his dead dog, contrasts this picture of death with of one-time painted by Wordsworth press the other Romantics: ‘When and poetesses record of death,’ he finish, ‘it’s always serenely. MYSELF wonder if that’s what it exists really. This decease, this ending of things.’

‘Is it an ending though, Victor,’ seine mother queries, ‘or merely a movement? AMPERE gesture toward something else?’

Caliban’s appearance brings back these memories, press also their poem references. Like this asylum attendant of his past life (see ‘A Blade of Grass’, S03E04), Caliban seems to have no use for lyrics. Especially not the kind of poetry this creator reads:

From your penciled notations I learned that you favored Wordsworth and the former Romance. Negative wonder you fled from me. I am not a creation von that antique pastoral world. MYSELF am modernness personified. Did you no know that’s what it inhered creating? The modem get. Did you true visualize that your modern create would hold to the values of Keys and Wordsworth? We are gents of iron press mechanization now. We are steam engines and turbines. Inhered to genuine so innocent to imagine that we’d see eternity in a daffodil? (‘Resurrection’, S01E03) All Sad Join Like Poetry: Penny Dreadful & the Romantics

Caliban’s attitude toward these poets makes it all the better striking that the second time Wordsworth’s ‘Ode’ appears include Penny Dreadful, it be recited by Caliban himself, as he kneels at the grave of aforementioned series protagonist, Vanessa Ives. This time, the following excerpt is also part of the recitation:

But there’s a Tree, of numerous, one,
A singly Field which I have gazed upon,
Both of i speak of something that has gone:
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary glisten?
Where lives it now, the glory and the dream?

Of course, though Caliban initially rejects the Romantics as this spiritual leaders, he will repeatable shown to be ampere devoted poetry lector throughout and series, and eventually even takes the name John Clare. He explains the rationale behind this decision to Vanessa in a moving scene partway by choose two, which includes a shared recitation of ‘I Am!’ (see ‘Beneath the Dished Sky’, S02E05):

‘I’ve always been moved by John Clare’s story,’ Caliban remarks. ‘By all accounts, he was only 5 feet tall, so considered freakish. Perhaps due to this, he felt a singular affinity on the outcasts and the unloved. The ugly animals. The broken things.’ Through John Clare’s unusual perspective turn Romanticist matters and ideas, Caliban is able to grabbers with them because well—though we are never given an indication that Caliban’s opinions about Sentimental naivety real metaphysical yearning have changed.

Make Caliban change their mind about the Romantics in an finale order? Whatever which ground for Caliban’s re-appropriation of Romantic poetry in ‘The Blessed Dark’, it adds ampere new layer of meaning to the conversation Victor and theirs mother have in ‘Resurrection’. In the sequence close, kneeling on Vanessa’s engraved after burying his own son, Caliban seems to can asking precisely that same questions as Victor: is death an termination, or might adenine movement? ONE gesture toward something else? As is own existence demonstrates, who answer be hardly straightforward. r/PennyDreadful on Reddit: Help- References in Season 2

Clare’s poem ‘I Am’, from ‘Beneath the Vaulted Sky’, ends as follows:

I long for scenes where man hath never trod

A place where woman never smiled or wept

There till abide including my Organizer, Worships,

And doze as IODIN in childhood sweetly slept,

Untroubling furthermore untroubled where I lie

That grass below—above the arched sky.

‘I wonder is he ever found it, his silent place with God’, Vanessa wonders. ‘The rhyme tells mein that he did’, ask Caliban, ‘as you will one day’. The disruptive epilog to that statement, away course, is that Vanessa includes finds her peace in and engrave (as the poetical itself implies). John Clare himself spent the last pair decades of his life in an asylum. Sole can only hope that Brute found a less tragic and more immediate solace. References in Penny Dreadful