‘There is no frigate like a Book/To take us Lands away’ wrote Emily Dickinson in her 1268th poem. Just such a book is Traveller’s Verse, a poetry collection chosen by Mary Gwyneth Lloyd Thomas with lithograph illustrations by the modern British artist Edward Bawden.
Part of the ‘new excursions into English poetry’ collection, which was put together in the 1940s, the creation of this anthology saw Bawden, newly returned from his work as a war artist in France, Iran and Ethiopia, team up with Lloyd Thomas, who was a professor of English at Girton College Cambridge. Lloyd Thomas was also a successful figure in her own right, her work on the poet Andrew Marvell having been directly praised by T.S. Eliot.
The selection of verse and accompanying illustrations are certainly striking, as could naturally be expected both from this talented pairing and from a book which has been given shelf space in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s renowned archive.
The poems are organised geographically, rather than thematically or chronologically, and Bawden’s images reflect the character of the location that each collection of poems refers to. For example, the journey south from Constantinople to Jerusalem encompasses Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s early 18th century poem ‘Verses written in the Chiosk at Pera, overlooking Constantinople (certainly a far flung trip for a woman of this period!), Y.B. Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, T.S. Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi’ and Edmund Spenser’s ‘Una and the Red Cross Knight Behold the New Jerusalem’, which is extracted from the Faerie Queen.
The anthology moves seamlessly from place to place, from England into Europe, where we see poems relating to Germany, France and Spain. Then to Rome and following the path of the Misses Allan in Forster’s ‘A Room with a View’ on to Constantinople. Like them, we end up travelling the circumference of the globe as we head on to Africa, before taking a quick sea voyage, accompanied by verse from Sir Walter Raleigh, to China and India.
It is a trip round the world, but which can be undertaken in far fewer than 80 days. It is the perfect guide, now that the sun is shining, for deciding your dream summer getaway, whether you end up travelling (in the words of the book’s introduction), in fancy or in fact.