University of Virginia Library

3.

In the third stanza, sometimes insensitively printed as the fifth, the tragedy grows blacker yet. After Florence C. Ingbrest and a handful of casual flames, the poet sought solace with the Mittley sisters of Boston. Researchers have shown that there were two: Daisy (or "Diz") Mittley, and her much younger sister Anne D'Intagh. It was the younger the poet loved, but again the romance was blighted by a conniving interloper, this time the wealthy Thaddeus Thrane of Glasgow, whose nationality is slyly derided in the dialectal "wi'" for "with". The butt of frequent barbs in the Skilmer corpus, he is here dismissed with a contemptuous phrase. Though his beloved Anne lived "wi'" Thrane at the time the poem was written, Skilmer seems less troubled by this passing infidelity than by her amour with Greymouth — for Greymouth is the true antecedent of "whose". We now learn that he was a heavy drinker — and immediately the mysterious soubriquet is clear. Extensive research has established that gris is the common French word for grey. But gris also means drunk. Greymouth then is unmasked as Drunk Mouth. Indeed, so great a guzzler was Greymouth that the loyal Miss Mittley was said, by a witty metonomy (or synecdoche)[2] to have lain not on his bosom but (with a pun that anticipates Joyce by several weeks) on his "boozin's". One almost hesitates to mention that "bosoms" too has its questionable advocates.[3] Be that as it may, one wonders if in all literature the tragedy of four lives has been so harrowingly adumbrated? All one can conjure up for comparison is Dante's But Dante, with his five and a half words for one life, is long-winded compared with Skilmer, who averages a mere three words per head, or even less, if one counts the "wi'" as fractional diction. In this grisly aperçu, so true of all humanity, the resources of typography too are put to unexampled use, with the two-letter "no" followed by an exclamation mark that is like a spine straight with moral indignation, and enclosed in the semicircularity of parentheses, like lips rounded in incredulous refusal. But the "no" is uncompromisingly jostled by the assertive has, with its harsh aspirate, distorted from honest Roman type into italics, set askew from the vertical: even the letters, means the poet, have lost their aplomb before the moral horror. (A textual note: there are those, and their name is legion,[4] who read "Hugh Inta Mittley" in the second line. But nothing in Skilmer's emotional history gives countenance to a suppositious passion for Anne's little brother Hugh, then three years and some months old.)